Cisco Buys Cloud-Based Services Management Company

Terms of the agreement to acquire the Vienna, Austria, company were not disclosed.

"SolveDirect’s cloud-based solutions offer enterprises and service providers a flexible way to integrate with service partners, and automate sharing of processes, data and workflows in real time by eliminating manual practices and bottlenecks, driving significant operational efficiencies," blogged Hilton Romanski, who leads M&A strategy within Cisco's corporate business development team. "SolveDirect’s capabilities will enable Cisco to extend our portfolio of smart and connected IT services to our global ecosystem of customers, partners and resellers."

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SolveDirect's ServiceGrid platform is designed to provide a "single point of collaboration," integrating business processes and providing service-level monitoring across multiple partners, regardless of their existing systems.

"If you look at the average enterprise today, they have between 12 and 15 external IT service partners that they work with," explained Mike Flannagan, senior director and general manager of Cisco's integration brokerage technology group. "The vast majority of interactions with those external parties are manual. They're either making phone calls back and forth, or sending emails, or using each other's web presence to provide updates on support issues. An automated electronic exchange of information is a lot more efficient. And that is effectively what SolveDirect does. It's a huge driver of operational efficiency that runs completely independent of any Cisco hardware or software solution."

Flannagan also noted that SolveDirect's engineering talent was also a key driver of the acquisition. "We think this acquisition makes a lot of sense because of the engineering talent that we acquire in software and cloud services, cloud service brokerage and technology capabilities," he said.

The SolveDirect acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s current fiscal year.

PUBLISHED MARCH 25, 2013