Cisco to Acquire newScale

Cisco intends to acquire newScale Inc., a provider of software that delivers a service catalog and self-service portal for IT organizations to select and quickly deploy cloud services within their businesses. The newScale technology allows commercial and enterprise customers to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis.

This purchase is in response to the increasing migration of enterprise computing users from traditional to cloud infrastructures. With the acquisition of newScale, Cisco says it will be able to accelerate the deployment of cloud services through a service catalog and self-service portal that allows customers to easily manage their IT infrastructures.

Cisco's publicly stated cloud strategy is to harness the network as a platform for building and using clouds and cloud services. The company says newScale will complement and expand existing Cisco and partner software offerings in IT and cloud management and automation.

newScale promotes its service portal as providing an intuitive "single pane of glass" cloud dashboard for its users, combining data from multiple sources into a highly configurable and flexible self-service portal interface. Users can configure their own portals to draw the specific cloud-based services and information they want to work with.

Cisco is no stranger to acquisitions, and the purchase comes only a few months after Cisco’s purchase of LineSider, a provider of tools for automating the construction of network services for cloud computing environments. With the addition of newScale technology, Cisco seeks to ease users’ access to those cloud services.

Financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the second half of Cisco's fiscal year 2011. Upon the close of the acquisition, the newScale team will report into Cisco's Advanced Services organization.