Cisco gets serious about cloud software with $125M acquisition of Cloupia

Networking behemoth Cisco has agreed to acquire cloud software business Cloupia for $150 million, the companies announced today.

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Cloupia offers software that automates the processes inside data centers. Ideally, it lets enterprises and service providers manage power, network services, storage, and virtual machines all in one interface. One of the Cloupia’s specialties is assisting companies with running software on private and public clouds together. The company reportedly has 30 customers and about 50 employees. Cloupia’s employees will be moved into Cisco’s Data Center Group.

(Cloud management and control is one of the six big themes of CloudBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s upcoming cloud conference, November 28-29 in Redwood Shores, Calif. — where Cisco’s chief technical officer, Lew Tucker, will be one of the speakers. Check out the CloudBeat agenda for more information.)

Cloupia’s cloud software specialties will likely help Cisco become a more prominent partner in building and maintaining data centers. Cloupia partners include Amazon, Rackspace, VMWare, and Microsoft, a collection of names Cisco will certainly find attractive to work with on cloud-focused projects.

“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,” said David Yen, SVP and GM of Cisco’s data center business group, in a statement. “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.”

Cisco expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013, which means some time in the next three months.

Money in clouds photo via Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock