Cisco disclosed two impending acquisitions intended to boost its offerings in the cloud management space. The vendor announced its intent to acquire privately held Cloupia, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based software company, for $125 million. Cloupia automates converged data center infrastructure – enabling enterprises and service providers to simplify the deployment and configuration of physical and virtual resources from a single management console.
In a separate announcement, Cisco also said it intended to acquire privately held Meraki Inc., a cloud networking provider, for $2.1 billion. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., with offices in New York, London and Mexico, Meraki offers on-premise networking solutions that can be centrally managed from the cloud.
Cloupia’s infrastructure management software enhances the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switching portfolio with a single “pane-of-glass” view into the automation of compute, network, storage, virtual machine, and operating system resources. When combined with Cisco UCS Manager, Cloupia enables enterprises and service providers to manage pools of computing power, network services, storage and virtual machines as a unified whole, Cisco says.
“Cisco’s data center strategy is based on the premise of making it easier for customers to deploy a unified and integrated infrastructure that is efficient, fast, and flexible,” says David Yen, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco Data Center Business Group. “This strategy involves the delivery of physical and virtual products that support multiple hypervisors and storage stacks. The addition of Cloupia’s automation software enhances the efficiency of such unified data center infrastructures, helping to accelerate the transition from physical to cloud environments.”
Upon the close of the acquisition, Cloupia employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Data Center Group. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.
The acquisition of Meraki complements and expands Cisco’s strategy to offer more software-centric solutions to simplify network management and help customers empower mobile workforces. The acquisition will also strengthen Cisco’s Unified Access platform, the vendor says. Meraki technology offers customers wifi, switching, security and mobile device management centrally managed from the cloud. Meraki solutions support BYOD, guest networking, application control, WAN optimization, application firewall and other advanced networking services.
Meraki was founded by members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory review.
More information is available at Cisco’s website at www.cisco.com.