Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held Cloupia, a software company that develops products for automating data center operations for the deployment and configuration of physical and virtual resources.

Cisco will pay $125 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Cloupia.

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Cloupia's infrastructure management software provides a single "pane-of-glass" view into the automation of compute, network, storage, virtual machine and operating system resources, Cisco says. It will work with Cisco's UCS Manager to control pools of compute, storage, networking and virtual machine resources in data centers, the company says.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2013. Cloupia employees will be integrated into Cisco's Data Center Group.