Cisco intents to acquire Cloupia and Meraki

Cisco announced on November 15 and 18 to be intentioned to acquire two privately held companies Cloupia and Meraki.

Cloupia, focused on cloud computing platform management with its flagship product Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC), as we mentioned in a past article, according to its management team the company could have been easily a Cisco spin-off, and apparently we were right.With Cloupia acquisition Cisco’s intentions are to simplify management of physical and virtual resources from a single management console. Apparenty Cisco is going to pay $125 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Cloupia and its employees are going to be integrated into Cisco’s Data Center Group and the acquisition could be completed in the second quarter of 2013.

The second acquisition is Californian company Meraki, a company founded by members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, that delivers networking solutions centrally managed from the cloud, Meraki solution would allow Cisco to offer a network software-centric solutions to simplify network management.

Cisco appears to be paying $1.2 billion in cash and retention-based incentives to acquire the entire business and operations of Meraki and as with Cloupia, this acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013

David Yen, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Data Center Business Group., comments about Cloupia’s acquisition:

Cisco’s data center strategy is based on the premise of making it easier for customers to deploy a unified and integrated infrastructure that is efficient, fast, and flexible, this strategy involves the delivery of the industry’s most comprehensive data center networking portfolio, which includes physical and virtual products that support multiple hypervisors and storage stacks. The addition of Cloupia’s automation software enhances the efficiency of such unified data center infrastructures, helping to accelerate the transition from physical to cloud environments more quickly and effectively.

Rob Soderbery, senior vice president, Cisco Enterprise Networking Group, declares about Meraki:

The acquisition of Meraki enables Cisco to make simple, secure, cloud managed networks available to our global customer base of mid-sized businesses and enterprises. These companies have the same IT needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex IT solutions, Meraki’s solution was built from the ground up optimized for cloud, with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.