Cisco Buys Tidal Software - Latest in a Wave of Purchases
Cisco Systems, the maker of networking equipment, has announced its intent to purchase Tidal Software for $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives.
Tidal Software, headquartered in San Jose, CA and Houston, TX produces software that helps companies manage, automate and coordinate their applications. The company's products include tools to monitor application performance and schedule jobs across machines and platforms.
The purchase comes shortly after Cisco bought Pure Digital, maker of the popular Flip video camera, and makes the second purchase in less than a month of a company that doesn't quite fit with Cisco's traditional business of making the computer equipment that forms the backbone of networks.
Cisco said in a statement that the acquisition "will bolster Cisco's data center strategy by providing timely, accurate and cost-efficient management and automation of application performance across entire business operations, from the server through the network to the desktop." This makes it sound like Cisco is buying Tidal in order to be able to package services similar to those offered by its rapidly rising competitors in the network infrastructure game like IBM and HP.
Together with the Pure Digital purchase, it looks like Cisco is making a move to become the major player in the content distribution industry. The Flip phone, coupled with Cisco-owned WebEx, will send tons of information over networks, Cisco will sell more of its core networking products, and, to top it off, will offer management software to keep all the new routers, switches and servers running smoothly.
The question is: Will the strategy pay off?
See Also:
Cisco buys Tidal Software for $105M -- to virtualize the data center (VentureBeat)
Cisco picks up Tidal Software (ZDNet)