Cisco Buying CliQr Startup

Cisco to buy cloud orchestrator CliQr for $260 million - Cisco has announced its intention to buy CliQr Technologies, a Californian start up that specialises in making apps run faster in the new bare metal, virtualised and container environments that are becoming increasingly pivotal in cloud computing.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $260 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016, subject to closing conditions. The CliQr team will join Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit reporting to Prem Jain, Cisco’s general manager.

Announcing the acquisition at Cisco’s Partner Summit, Cisco’s VP of Corporate Development Robert Salvagno said that the new technology will help its systems integrators and service provider partners to simplify the marshalling of resources and help get private, public and hybrid cloud projects running quicker. CliQr has out-of-the box support for all major public cloud environments.

Cisco said it will now continue to integrate CliQr across its data centre portfolio.

Cisco had already integrated CliQr with its Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing systems (UCS) prior to acquisition, in a bid to improve the movement of applications between on-premise and cloud environments. Having achieved that it now aims to integrate CliQr across its data centre portfolio, extending the ‘orchestration of services’ to cover eventualities such as bare metal computing, containerised systems and all the various types of virtualisation.

CliQr simplifies management by giving customers a single system for managing the application lifecycle across hybrid IT environments. Cisco claims the system is intuitive and can simplify the most complex systems. With computing becoming a hybrid of traditional on premise IT and services running in the cloud, many CIOs and network managers have been left behind by the new complexity and inefficiencies and blockages have emerged which Cisco claims it can now smooth out.

Among the productivity improvements promised by CliQr is a feature that allows managers to create a single, secure application profile that can then be whizzed across any data centre, public or private cloud. Other managerial time savers include a consistent policy making scheme, an application optimiser across hybrid systems, a one click rollout and ‘complete visibility’ and control across applications, cloud environments and users.