Cisco has announced its intent to acquire Tidal Software, Inc., a privately held data center management provider. Tidal's intelligent application management and automation solutions that will advance Cisco's aggressive data center strategy, a Cisco spokesperson says. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives.

"Cisco believes the network has become the logical platform to manage and maintain mission-critical applications," according to Gary Moore, senior vice president of advanced services at Cisco.  "With the acquisition of Tidal Software, Cisco will accelerate its ability to help customers optimize the performance of their business applications and automate operational best practices in real time, which will lead to significantly reduced operational costs."

Tidal's management solutions extend from servers to networks to desktops. Cisco says the acquisition furthers its vision of Unified Computing, an evolutionary data center architecture, which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single cohesive system.

Upon the close of the acquisition, the Tidal Software team will become part of the Cisco Advanced Services organization. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2009.

For more details, visit the Cisco website.