Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Metacloud

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Sep 17, 2014) – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its intent to acquire privately held Metacloud. Based in Pasadena, Calif., Metacloud deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with a unique OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center.

Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to build the world’s largest global Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything. Since announcing its Intercloud strategy in March, Cisco has made rapid progress, enlisting key technology partners, service and cloud providers, all of whom are standardizing upon the Cisco Cloud Services architecture, which is based onOpenStack open source software for building private and public clouds.

With OpenStack gaining global acceptance through its ability to handle any workload on any hypervisor on any public or private cloud, the ability to manage OpenStack installations at scale is a critical component of Cisco’s Intercloud strategy. Cisco’s acquisition of Metacloud’s remote managed OpenStack Private Cloud-as-a-Service platform will play an increasingly important role in accelerating Cisco customers’ journey to the cloud, enabling enterprises to match the as-a-Service operational benefits of public cloud with the security and control provided by private cloud. Metacloud also will allow service providers to combine their public cloud deployments with remotely managed OpenStack private clouds, and to deliver unique Intercloud offerings to their customers.

“Cloud computing has dramatically changed the IT landscape. To enable greater business agility and lower costs, organizations are shifting from an on-premise IT structure to hybrid IT — a mix of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “The resulting silos present a challenge to IT administrators, as choice, visibility, data sovereignty and protection in this world of many clouds requires an open platform. We believe Metacloud’s technology will play a critical role in enabling our customers to experience a seamless journey to a new world of many clouds, providing choice, flexibility, and data governance.”

Upon completion of the acquisition, Metacloud employees will join Cisco’s Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services organization led by Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president. The acquisition of Metacloud is expected to be complete in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015, subject to customary closing conditions.

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Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the expected completion of the acquisition and the time frame in which this will occur, the expected benefits to Cisco and its customers from completing the acquisition, plans regarding Metacloud personnel, and acceleration of Cisco’s Intercloud strategy. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors, including, among other things, the potential impact on the business of Metacloud due to the uncertainty about the acquisition, the retention of employees of Metacloud and the ability of Cisco to successfully integrate Metacloud and to achieve expected benefits, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, customer markets and various geographic regions, global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment and other risk factors set forth in Cisco’s most recent report on Form 10-K. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.

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