Cisco Systems gave its cloud platform a boost with the acquisition of hybrid cloud management provider CliQr Technologies Inc.

The company’s 195^th acquisition, Cisco will pay $260 million in cash and equity awards for the Santa Clara, CA-based company. The purchase is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016.

CliQr’s CloudCenter platform helps customers manage the entire application lifecycle across hybrid environments, whether simple or complex. A key feature is its ability to measure the price and performance of applications on any cloud environment, helping users decide the best place to put their applications.

Cisco said the platform will also help customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. Using a single management interface, they will be able to plan, monitor and control their cloud resources in a unified way.

CliQr’s CloudCenter also helps ensure consistent policies are applied. It automatically applies a customer’s access control and security policies to an application, then ensures that those policies move with the application.

“Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development, in a statement. “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.”

CliQr aligns well with the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure platform, said Brian Gracely, lead cloud analyst at Wikibon. Cisco is very focused on building models for networking and security, and CliQr will help them at the application level, he said.

“It will also give customers a way to have some control over applications deployed to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, where the Cisco ACI technology doesn’t exist today but might be used in the future to create private/public hybrid models for customers,” Gracely said.

Not surprising

The acquisition isn’t a big surprise, as CliQr is already integrated with many of Cisco’s data center switching and cloud solutions, including Cisco’s ACI and Unified Computing System (UCS). Cisco said it will keep CliQr operational as it is today, with the CliQr team joining Cisco’s Insieme business unit, and integrate the platform into its Cisco One Enterprise Cloud Suite.

The purchase also marks the latest move by Cisco to catch up in the cloud computing arena. Earlier this year, the company announced it is buying Jasper Technologies Inc., which provides a cloud-based software platform for the Internet of Things (IoT).

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