Cisco Buys Cloupia for $125 Million
Cisco on Thursday agreed to acquire cloud upstart Cloupia for $125 million in the company's latest bid to unify converged datacenters with cloud infrastructure and services.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Cloupia, founded in 2009, offers software that lets organizations administer traditional datacenter infrastructure with cloud-based infrastructure. Cloupia's software provides a common interface to manage and monitor infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments and is aligned with key providers.
In addition to an existing alliance with Cisco, Cloupia has partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), EMC, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp, Rackspace and the Virtual Compute Environment, a company formed by Cisco and EMC. Cloupia's flagship product, the Unified Infrastructure Controller, lets organizations build private clouds and manage hybrid infrastructures.
Hilton Romansk, Cisco's vice president of business development, said in a blog post that the move builds on the company's effort to enable enterprise customers to manage its Unified Computing System and its Nexus switches and other third-party cloud infrastructure and services. Romansk explains how the deal accomplishes that goal:
Cisco's acquisition of Cloupia benefits Cisco's Data Center strategy by providing single "pane-of-glass" management across Cisco and partner solutions including FlexPod, VSPEX, and Vblock. Cloupia's products will integrate into the Cisco data center portfolio through UCS Manager, UCS Central, and Nexus 1000V, strengthening Cisco's overall ecosystem strategy by providing open APIs for integration with a broad community of developers and partners.
Similar to previous acquisitions in cloud management, such as Tidal, LineSider and NewScale, the acquisition of Cloupia also complements Cisco's Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) solution.
In short, he concludes the acquisition of Cloupia will help Cisco provide intelligent network orchestration and management by bridging traditional datacenters and cloud infrastructure. It aims to offer the benefits of cloud automation by providing a view of an organization's entire compute, network, storage, VM and operating system resources.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 15, 2012