Cisco has stated its intent to acquire CliQr Technologies, the provider of an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualised and container environments.
The acquisition will provide a complete solution to customers and help simplify and accelerate private, public and hybrid cloud deployments.
CliQr already integrates with Cisco ACI to enable application portability for on-premise and cloud environments and moving forward, Cisco will continue to integrate CliQr across its data centre portfolio.
Together, CliQr and Cisco will make it simpler for customers to automate and manage application policies across the entire data centre stack.
"Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds," said Rob Salvagno, vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. "With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realise the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment."
The CliQr team will join Cisco's Insieme Business Unit reporting to Prem Jain, senior vice president and general manager. Under the terms of the agreement Cisco will pay $260m in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives.
The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions.