CliQr Technologies

CliQr Technologies, now known as Cisco CloudCenter following its acquisition, was founded in 2010 by Gaurav Manglik and Tenry Fu. The founders' backgrounds at VMWare, where they experienced the complexities of cloud infrastructure firsthand, directly shaped CliQr's mission to simplify multi-cloud application management. The company's core offering was an application-defined cloud management platform designed to enable businesses to deploy and manage their applications across various data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments. This platform, branded CloudCenter, operated on a hybrid cloud management model, targeting enterprises struggling with the operational challenges of a multi-cloud strategy. Its primary function was to abstract away the complexities of underlying cloud infrastructures, allowing clients to model an application's topology and dependencies once and then deploy it across any supported cloud environment without modification. This capability significantly reduced the need for cloud-specific expertise and manual scripting, thereby accelerating deployment times and improving governance. The business model centered on providing this software solution to large enterprises, helping them to modernize and automate their data centers or to incorporate public cloud application deployment into their service portfolios. CliQr's key differentiator was its focus on the application itself as the focal point for management, rather than the infrastructure. In a significant milestone, Cisco Systems acquired CliQr Technologies in 2016 for a reported $260 million. The acquisition was a strategic move by Cisco to bolster its software and cloud offerings, integrating CliQr's technology into its data center and cloud solutions portfolio. The platform became Cisco CloudCenter, a key component of Cisco's hybrid cloud strategy, aiming to provide a single, secure platform for managing application lifecycles across diverse environments. Keywords: cloud management, hybrid cloud, application migration, multi-cloud orchestration, cloud automation, application-defined management, data center automation, cloud governance, Cisco CloudCenter, enterprise software