Cisco to Acquire CliQr for Cloud Orchestration

Cisco agreed to acquire CliQr Technologies, a start-up offering an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualized and container environments. Cisco will pay $260 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives.

The CliQr platform provides a broad variety of application profile templates and an integrated service library to make it easier to model new or existing, simple or complex applications in a way that is cloud agnostic. CliQr already integrates with Cisco ACI to enable application portability for on-premise and cloud environments. The company cites 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. 

Cisco said it will integrate CliQr across its data center portfolio. 1The CliQr team will join Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit reporting to Prem Jain, senior vice president and general manager. The goal is to make it simpler for customers to automate and manage application policies across the entire data center 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 realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment.”

http://www.cisco.com
http://www.cliqr.com

• CliQr was founded by Gaurav Manglik and Tenry Fu, both previously from VMware. 
•  Investors in CliQr included Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, Translink Capital, and Polaris Partners.