Cisco on Tuesday agreed to purchase privately held Whiptail - a company that makes software to manage cloud-based flash storage - for $415 million in cash. The deal marks Cisco's 12 acquisition on the year and brings the total money spent on purchases to over $4 billion. Over the past four years, Cisco has shelled out more than $18 billion on their way to securing nearly 70 deals.
Whiptail is described as a leader in high performance, scalable solid state memory systems that enable organizations to simplify data center and virtualized environments and process more data in less time according to a press release on the matter.
Cisco believes the acquisition will help strengthen their Unified Computing System strategy and enhance application performance by integrating scalable solid state memory into the UCS's fabric computing architecture.
Applications like virtual desktops and data analytics are imposing increased performance demands on traditional storage systems. As such, solid state memory systems need to be brought closer to applications to help bridge that performance gap.
Vice president and general manager Paul Perez said Cisco is focused on providing a converged infrastructure including compute, network and high performance solid state that will help address their customers' requirements for next-generation computing environments.
Once the acquisition is complete, Whiptail's employees will be integrated into the Computing Systems Product Group. Cisco expects the acquisition to be wrapped up in the first quarter of fiscal year 2014 following customary closing conditions.