Cisco expands cloud portfolio with key acquisitions

As evidenced by continually skyrocketing adoption and expanding service offerings, the cloud can bring real value for both enterprises and vendors. According to RightScale’s 2016 State of the Cloud Report, cloud usage has never before been higher. Currently, businesses with this technology in place leverage an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds, and are also experimenting with additional private and public environments.

Overall, these increasing demands are translating to one thing for service providers: a need to offer more and more cloud-based solutions. Cisco has heard this call, and has made several very key acquisitions to bolster its expanding cloud services portfolio.

Cisco acquires Piston in 2015

Cisco’s journey to growing its cloud offerings in earnest began in 2015, with the acquisition of Piston Cloud Computing, a San Francisco-based organization offering OpenStack products. The company’s solutions enabled more streamlined management and orchestration of large-scale, distributed systems, including cloud environments. According to Cisco, this acquisition in particular was made to drive Cisco’s advancing Intercloud strategy.

“Cisco addresses the changing needs of its enterprise and service provider customers through its Intercloud strategy,” Cisco stated. “Intercloud is an open solution that brings together organizations’ private clouds, major public clouds, and Cisco and partner clouds, and enables movement of workloads across heterogeneous environments.”

Three acquisitions in three days

Cisco made headlines again in late October 2015, when it inked three merger and acquisition deals in three days, including another cloud-based provider. 1 Mainstream, which provided on-demand and live multi-screen cloud services, was brought into the Cisco fold at that time, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported. The newly acquired company joined Cisco’s service provider video software and solutions cloud engineering group.

Cisco noted in a blog post that the acquisitions “highlight how we are applying our unique approach to innovation to capture key market disruptions in areas such as cloud (1 Mainstream)…”

Acquisitions also included ParStream, an analytics provider, and Lancope, specializing in security systems.

Several key acquisitions have helped Cisco grow its cloud capabilities.

Acquiring another cloud startup

Cisco’s buying spree did not end with the close of 2015 either. In early March 2016, the tech giant announced plans to further grow its cloud portfolio with the purchase of cloud computing startup CliQr. Fortune reported that Cisco would pay around $260 million for the company, which helps facilitate efficient software usage across internal corporate infrastructure and public cloud data centers.

“Cisco and CliQr have already worked to integrate their respective technologies, so the acquisition isn’t a total surprise,” Fortune noted. “Cisco sees big business in the so-called hybrid cloud scenarios in which a company’s internal infrastructure works in conjunction with that of cloud providers.”

Overall, these acquisitions cement Cisco’s place in the cloud industry, putting the tech giant in a position to address a growing number of enterprise cloud needs.

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