Virtuata secures machine level information in data centers and cloud environments. Together, Cisco and Virtuata will enable consistent and enhanced security for virtual machines allowing customers to accelerate the deployment of multi-tenant, multi-hypervisor cloud infrastructures, according to Hilton Romanski, a vice president and head of Cisco's Corporate Business Development.

Filling Out UCS

"Cloud and virtualization are significant disrupters in the market. When customers move to these environments, security concerns arise where infrastructure is shared across multiple applications, business units or even organizations," Romanski said.

"As more and more business applications move to virtualized platforms, security and isolation become necessary conditions at the virtual machine level. This acquisition is highly complementary to Cisco's vision of a unified data center that securely connects people and businesses with applications and data through virtual and cloud environments."

Cisco is acquiring both the technology and the talent that makes up Virtuata. The company said the combination offers a unique infrastructure expertise in virtualization, cloud and security domains to Cisco's data center and cloud product portfolio, including its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus-based Unified Fabric portfolio.

Cisco's UCS is a converged data center platform that delivers programmable infrastructure in bare-metal, virtualized and cloud computing environments. The system integrates Cisco servers and network and I/O resources into one system.

The Right Security Move

"The Virtuata acquisition reinforces Cisco's build, buy, partner innovation framework and supports our strategy of providing best-in-class solutions for our customers," Romanski said. "It is well-aligned to our strategic goals to develop innovative virtualization, cloud and security technologies, while also cultivating top talent."

We caught up with Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, to get his take on the small acquisition. He told us Virtuata fits in well with Cisco's overall acquisition strategy, which inks big deals and small deals when necessary to fill out its portfolio. Cisco has acquired five companies this year. Four of them have been focused on the data center and networking.

"This fits squarely into the cloud and data center space, which has been a big focus for Cisco. That's the area of IT that's been the most opportunistic right now because you've got this coming together of compute, storage and networking gear. Almost all vendors in that space, be it Dell, HP or Cisco, are fighting for more and more footprint," Kerravala said.

"With security being by far the biggest inhibitor to broader cloud adoption, this is probably the right move for Cisco to make. I think Virtuata is a good addition to its cloud portfolio. It makes a lot of sense for them."