Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire CliQr

Cisco announced the intent to acquire CliQr Technologies Inc., a privately held company based in San Jose. CliQr provides an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualized and container environments. This acquisition will help Cisco customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. CliQr is already integrated with a number of Cisco’s data center switching and cloud solutions, including Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS).

CliQr provides customers with a single, intuitive platform that helps customers manage the entire application lifecycle across hybrid IT environments, whether simple or complex. CliQr’s CloudCenter platform provides a compelling solution for modern IT organizations whether they are moving their first applications to the cloud, deploying self-service IT environments, or wanting to gain visibility and control across a vast portfolio of clouds, applications and users.

CliQr provides customers with several key benefits:

• Profile once, deploy anywhere: CliQr’s solution allows customers to create a single application profile that is simple and secure to deploy across any data center, public or private cloud.
• Ensure consistent policies: CliQr automatically applies a customer’s access control and security policies to an application, and then ensures that those policies move with the application.
• Optimize applications across hybrid cloud environments: CliQr will measure both price and performance of applications on any cloud environment, helping users to make informed decisions about the best place for their application on any data center or cloud.
• Manage with one-click: CliQr provides a single management interface to give customers complete visibility and control across applications, cloud environments and users.

“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 realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment.”

Moving forward, Cisco will continue to integrate CliQr across Cisco’s data center portfolio. Together, CliQr and Cisco will make it simpler for customers to automate and manage application policies across the entire data center stack.  CliQr already integrates with Cisco ACI to enable application portability for on-premise and cloud environments and provide a complete solution for customers. In addition, CliQr has out-of-the box support for all major public cloud environments.

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 $260 million 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.