Cisco is to acquire hybrid cloud management firm CliQr for £260m

CliQr was founded in 2010 and has raised about $38m from investors including Google Ventures

Cisco is to buy CliQr, a provider of application management solutions for hybrid cloud environments, for $260m. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.

The networking hardware giant is buying the San Jose-based cloud company in a bid to strengthen its hybrid cloud management offerings. Cisco claimed that the acquisition would help its customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

CliQr was founded in 2010 and had raised about $38m from investors that include Google Ventures and Foundation Capital.

CliQr's technology is already being used by Cisco in a number of switching and cloud offerings, including Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS).

"Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds," said Rob Salvagno, vice president of corporate development at Cisco.

"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," he added.

Cisco suggested that CliQr would provide its customers with a single platform dubbed the CloudCenter, which would give end users the ability to move application by application into a cloud environment.

Cisco said that CliQr would integrate with the firm's existing data centre products, and CliQr employees would join Cisco's Insieme Business Unit, reporting to Prem Jain, who is the senior vice president and general manager of the division.

Cisco has been on an acquisition trail of late; last month it announced its intention to acquire Internet of Things specialist Jasper for $1.4bn, while it has also acquired a host of cloud computing firms such as 1 Mainstream, OpenDNS, Piston Cloud Computing and Tropo.

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