For Cisco, the acquisition of Cloupia is the next step in its strategy to succeed in the market of increasingly converged infrastructure, Paul Perez, CTO of Cisco’s data center group, said. While many other players focus on managing either the virtual or the physical infrastructure, Cisco is choosing to provide management across both worlds.

“Having a seamless operating model and a seamless policy model that spans both the physical and virtual domains are a key area of value generation for Cisco,” Perez said. “Customers want to straddle both environments.”

Cisco announced its intent to buy Cloupia, a Santa Clara, California-based data center automation firm, for about US$125m cash earlier this week.

If the acquisition is closed, Cisco plans to provide an open, documented and supported API for Cloupia’s infrastructure management solution. It will also interface with other high-level automation frameworks, such as IBM’s Tivoli.

The company wants to provide customers with a choice of technologies, but its major strategic thrust is providing infrastructure solutions using the pre-integrated model: either buy one of the full stacks Cisco offers together with its partners or use a Cisco-approved architecture.

In a way, Cloupia is Cisco’s software-defined data center play, although Perez does not like the expression. “The term ‘defined’ for me is kind of passive,” he said. “I like to think more in terms of ‘application-driven data center’, where there is a key role for the infrastructure to play and it’s around the concept of intelligence.” The ability to marry infrastructure and applications is key, he said.

Cisco and Cloupia have had a two-year relationship. Cloupia provides management software for Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and FlexPod, a joint IT solution by Cisco and NetApp that combines NetApp storage and UCS (servers and networking), virtualized by either VMware or Microsoft virtualization platforms.

Cloupia was one of the first companies to code its management solution to plug into UCS management API (application programming interface), Perez said.

Cloupia has multiple technologies that make it attractive for Cisco, besides its core capability of FlexPod management, including Cloud Genie, which takes infrastructure management to mobile devices.

The secret sauce lies in Cloupia’s unified-infrastructure controller, which helps build, deploy and manage multiple IP services, including everything from compute, storage and networking to hypervisors and OS (operating system) images.

This provides Cisco with “a fair number of evolutionary paths”, Perez said. “Clearly, adding value to the existing relationships that we have with storage vendors is our key priority,” he said. There is also interest in the blade and rack server market, but the exact strategy has not been hashed out, as the deal has not been closed.

If it is closed, Cisco will continue Cloupia’s existing support for switches by Brocade, a major competitor, at least initially. “Cloupia has a customer base,” Perez said. “We will support that customer base. In my experience, having support for third parties can sometimes be a good insertion tactic. It acts as a bridge to have a more orderly migration as opposed to a mass rip and replace.”

Still, Cisco will have to wait until the close of the acquisition to have a more open discussion with Cloupia on this subject, he added. Once the deal is completed, Cisco is planning to have Cisco-branded Cloupia products on its global price list as soon as possible. “Then we’ll go into a deeper rational and roadmap.”