Cisco Intends to Acquire Metacloud

Cisco Technology, Inc. announced its intent to acquire privately held Metacloud, Inc.

Based in Pasadena, CA, Metacloud deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with an OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center.

OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to build the Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, secure cloud platform capable of meeting the demands of the Internet of Everything.

Since announcing its Intercloud strategy in March, Cisco has made progress, enlisting technology partners, service and cloud providers, all of whom are standardizing upon the Cisco cloud services architecture, which is based on OpenStack open source software for building private and public clouds.

With OpenStack gaining global acceptance through its ability to handle any workload on any hypervisor on any public or private cloud, the ability to manage OpenStack installations at scale is a critical component of Cisco’s Intercloud strategy. The acquisition of Metacloud’s remote managed OpenStack Private Cloud-as-a-Service platform will play an important role in accelerating Cisco customers’ journey to the cloud, enabling enterprises to match the as-a-service operational benefits of public cloud with the security and control provided by private cloud. Metacloud also will allow service providers to combine their public cloud deployments with remotely managed OpenStack private clouds, and to deliver Intercloud offerings to their customers.

“Cloud computing has dramatically changed the IT landscape. To enable greater business agility and lower costs, organizations are shifting from an on-premise IT structure to hybrid IT – a mix of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications,” said Hilton Romanski, SVP, Cisco corporate development. “The resulting silos present a challenge to IT administrators, as choice, visibility, data sovereignty and protection in this world of many clouds requires an open platform. We believe Metacloud’s technology will play a critical role in enabling our customers to experience a seamless journey to a new world of many clouds, providing choice, flexibility, and data governance.“

Upon completion of the acquisition, Metacloud employees will join Cisco’s cloud infrastructure and managed services organization led by Faiyaz Shahpurwala, SVP.

The acquisition is expected to be complete in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015, subject to customary closing conditions.