Cisco Continues Data Center Push With Tidal Buy

Cisco Systems continued its charge into the data center on Thursday, revealing that it intends to acquire application management and automation vendor Tidal Software in a $105 million deal.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tidal makes intelligent application management and automation solutions that Cisco said will advance its data center strategy by enhancing its product and service delivery offerings.

For the past year, Cisco has hammered the data center, unveiling a line of high-powered data center switches in its Nexus line and offering Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

Most notably, Cisco last month pulled the curtain off of its Unified Computing System (UCS), a solution set that ties together Ethernet switches, blade servers and a one-stop management console, along with a flurry of contributions from dozens of technology partners.

At the time of the launch, John Chambers, president and CEO of the San Jose, Calif.-based networking powerhouse, said UCS will "bring together the compute power, the storage access and the networking capabilities" of the next-generation data center and facilitate Cisco's vision of accessing information from any device, any network and any location at any time. Essentially, the UCS architecture unites compute, storage access and virtualization resources into a single system.

"Cisco believes the network has become the logical platform to manage and maintain mission-critical applications," said Gary Moore, Cisco's senior vice president of advanced services, in a statement. "With the acquisition of Tidal Software, Cisco will accelerate its ability to help customers optimize the performance of their business applications and automate operational best practices in realtime, which will lead to significantly reduced operation costs."

Cisco said Tidal Software's solutions will beef up Cisco's data center strategy by offering timely, accurate and cost-efficient management and automation of application performance across business operations, from the server through the network to the desktop. Cisco added that the Tidal purchase also opens the door for Cisco and its channel partners to offer partner-led services leveraging Cisco's application management capabilities.

Cisco said when the acquisition closes, which is expected in the fourth quarter of Cisco's fiscal 2009, the Tidal Software team will become part of Cisco's Advanced Services organization.

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