Cisco is buying a startup called CliQr Technologies for $260 million in a move that underscores the fact that for most enterprises, hybrid cloud computing is the path forward. Here are the details from Cisco's announcement:
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 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.
Analysis: CliQr Gives Cisco, Customers Options for Cloud
CliQr is Cisco's 195th acquisition and could prove to be a pivotal tool as it battles for cloud workloads with the likes of Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft.
While Cisco plans to continue weaving CliQr's technology into its data center stack, the platform supports out of the box more than 15 data center, private cloud and public cloud environments, as a CliQr whitepaper notes:
Datacenter – Management solutions include Cisco UCS Director, Cisco ACI, VMware vCenter, and other software-defined infrastructure management solutions.
Private Cloud – A wide range of OpenStack implementations, as well as CloudStack and VMware vCloud Director.
Public Cloud – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Platform, Dimension Data, HP Cloud, IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, and VMware vCloud Air among others.
Overall, the deal is "another proof point that hybrid is where the business is and the incumbent vendors want a part of that," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "This is consistent with e.g., IBM partnering with VMware, Redhat acquiring Ansible and so on. It looks like the traditional infrastructure vendors are moving the enterprise to the cloud via Hybrid Street."
CliQr competes with the likes of Rightscale and Gravitant, particularly around the notion of price and performance optimization for application workloads. With those options and others in the market, the coming months could see Cisco's cloud competitors make similar moves to the CliQr acquisition.
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