CliQr will remain independent, promises Cisco

• The deal has all the signs of ‘a perfect marriage’
• CliQr to continue to support all its 18 cloud platforms

 
WHEN networking giant Cisco Systems Inc announced its US$260-million acquisition of cloud and application security startup CliQr Technologies Inc last month, there were concerns that customers would be turned off by CliQr losing its vendor-neutral, independent stance.
 
However, that has not been the case at all, argues Cisco vice president Soni Jiandani (pic above).
 
“Actually, we have so many customers that are CliQr users that felt relieved that it is now part of Cisco,” she says, speaking to Digital News Asia (DNA) on the sidelines of the recent Cisco Live convention in Melbourne.
 
“When you do business with a 100-people company, there are concerns about the viability of the company, its path and its exit strategy,” she adds, referring to CliQr.
 
The acquisition also further reinforces the fact that Cisco is serious about its hybrid cloud strategy, and that it would be agnostic and able to support whatever platform the customer prefers, argues Soni, who is also part of Cisco’s Insieme business unit.
 
Cisco acquired Insieme, which specialises in software-defined networking, for US$863 million in November 2013.
 
CliQr, a privately held company based in San Jose, California, provides an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualised, and containerised environments.
 
Essentially, it is a tool that helps IT departments move workloads from one environment to another (for example, from a private to a public cloud).
 
The CliQr acquisition would help Cisco serve its customers better, especially in a world where enterprises have to manage many applications across different cloud platforms, according to Soni.
 
“With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realise the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications in any hybrid cloud environment,” she says.
 
Cisco plans to integrate CliQr across its data centre portfolio, to make it simpler for customers to automate and manage application policies across the entire data centre stack.
 
The CliQr team will join Cisco’s Insieme business unit. The acquisition is expected to be completed sometime in the third quarter of this year.
 
Soni declares that the CliQr deal has all the signs of “a perfect marriage.”
 
“We are both app-centric and policy-driven. We are coming from the bottom-up, and they are coming from top-down,” she says.
 
She also promises that CliQr customers will continue to have the flexibility they currently enjoy, as it will continue to support all the 18 cloud platforms it is currently supporting.
 
“We don’t believe in locking in to any one cloud … we will continue to execute down that path,” she adds.
 
Goh Thean Eu reports from Cisco Live in Melbourne at the invitation of Cisco Systems. All editorials are independent.
 
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Digital transformation not about ROI: Cisco exec
 
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