Cisco Systems Inc. may have made its name selling proprietary switches and routers to traditional enterprises, but the networking stalwart is determined to be a part of the open-source hybrid cloud. The company stepped up its efforts on Wednesday with the landmark acquisition of Metacloud Inc., one of the dozens of contenders vying for dominance in the OpenStack community.

The three-year-old startup offers a homegrown edition of the free cloud operating system with an improved clustering mechanism that supports infrastructure redundancy to minimize the risk of downtime and real-time monitoring capabilities for geographically distributed environments. Also included in the package is an integrated identity management system and a number of other features not available with the open-source version of OpenStack.

Yet what led Cisco to pick out Metacloud from the numerous pure-play distributors in the market was not the platform itself but rather the way it’s delivered. Whereas most of Metacloud’s competitors sell their software as-is with a limited selection of professional services on the side, the startup offers to shoulder the full burden of managing customers’ deployments and everything that entails. This allows CIOs to have their cake and eat it too: they can keep workloads behind the corporate firewall without having to deal with the complexity involved in running the underlying infrastructure.

Metacloud also gives customers the option of hosting their OpenStack environments in its six facilities and provides a hybrid plan that integrates on- and off-premise installations into an interoperable whole. That emphasis on providing a choice of delivery models makes the startup a good fit with Cisco’s plans to build a federated network of clouds that are broad and diverse enough to accommodate all the different organizations that are embracing the trend.

The networking giant pledged more than $1 billion toward realizing its “intercloud” vision earlier this year following similar nine-digit commitments from fellow industry big-names such as Hewlett-Packard Co., which also acquired a cloud startup of its own last week. HP reportedly paid in the neighborhood of $100 million for Amason Web Services compatibility specialist Eucalyptus Inc., presumably to help make its OpenStack-powered hybrid computing portfolio compatible with Amazon.com Inc.’s market-leading infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Yet while HP and Cisco have both made the open cloud platform the lynchpin of their respective cloud strategies, the former is building out an internal portfolio while the switching kingpin’s plan relies primarily on partners for delivering services to customers. That adds some complexity to the acquisition of Metacloud, which will potentially pit it against Intercloud members such as VMware Inc. that have their own commercial versions of OpenStack.

But at the end of the day, the deal puts Cisco in a better position to address the main threat to its business – Amazon – than it was before, a fact that offsets the risk of adding tension to a few partnerships. No financial terms were disclosed for the transaction, which is set to close in the company’s first fiscal quarter pending regulatory approval.

Video of Sean Lynch CEO of MetaCloud at Openstack Summit

John Furrier and Stu Miniman interview Sean Lynch CEO of Metacloud on @theCUBE at the recent Openstack Summit in Atlanta. “Openstack as a service is a trend that Cisco is now embracing with the Metacloud acquisition” says John Furrier founder of SiliconANGLE.

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