Cisco to Buy Cloud Orchestration Vendor CliQr

Cisco Systems is buying CliQr Technologies, a company whose orchestration platform is designed to help customers better manage the lifecycle of applications in the cloud.

Cisco officials announced the company’s intent to buy CliQr for $260 million March 1, the first day of its Partner Summit 2016 event.

CliQr’s CloudCenter platform provides customers with a single product to manage the application lifecycles across hybrid clouds, including bare metal, virtualized and container environments. The company’s technology already is being used by Cisco in various switching and cloud offerings, including Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco officials said.

“Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds,” Rob Salvagno, vice president of corporate development at Cisco, said in a statement. “With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment.”

CliQr’s platform offers customers the ability to create a single application profile that can be easily and securely deployed across the data center, public or private cloud. It also, automatically applies the company’s access control and security policies to an application and makes sure the policies move with the application. In addition, the technology will measure price and performance of the applications in the cloud, and gives customers a single management interface.

According to Cisco officials, the plan is to continue to integrate CliQr with the company’s data center products. CliQr employees will join Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit, and will report to Prem Jain, senior vice president and general manager of the division.

CliQr was launched in 2010, and had raised about $38 million, including $20 million in April 2015.