Cisco Thursday said it will acquire infrastructure management software provider Cloupia, in a move to extend how Cisco automates converged infrastructure resources in the data center.

Cisco will pay about $125 million and what it described as "retention-based incentives" in exchange for all shares of Cloupia, whose employees will join Cisco's data center group. Cisco plans to leverage Cloupia's software especially for its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switching products, to offer a "single pane of glass" view into how networking, compute, storage, virtual machine and operating system resources are used.

David Yen, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco's Data Center Business Group, said the acquisition was about making infrastructure faster, more flexible and more efficient.

"This strategy involves the delivery of the industry's most comprehensive data center networking portfolio, which includes physical and virtual products that support multiple hypervisors and storage stacks," Yen said in a statement. "The addition of Cloupia's automation software enhances the efficiency of such unified data center infrastructures, helping to accelerate the transition from physical and cloud environments more quickly and effectively."

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Cloupia, Santa Clara, Calif., was founded in 2009 by a group of veteran data center, virtualization and enterprise systems management executives. CEO Raju Datla is a Cisco alumnus, and a previous company he founded and led, Jahi Networks, was acquired by Cisco in 2004. Cloupia was named to CRN's hot emerging vendors list in 2011.

Cisco expects the acquisition to be completed during the current quarter, the second of its fiscal 2013. On Cisco's first-quarter earnings call earlier this week, Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni said that Cisco's traditionally brisk pace of M&A activity has picked up again and that Cisco will continue to actively acquire. Other significant deals Cisco's made this year were for vCider and ThinkSmart, as well as a $5 billion blockbuster acquisition of NDS Corp.

PUBLISHED NOV. 15, 2012