Cisco announced its intent to acquire ContainerX, Inc. Cisco’s first acquisition in the rapidly emerging container market.

ContainerX is an early stage, privately held company focused on building technology to help enterprises manage, orchestrate and integrate containers across data centers.

Many of our customers are starting to use containers to build, deploy and manage cloud native applications. Containers provide an easy, flexible way to build, test, deploy, and move applications across a variety of environments, including public clouds, private clouds and hybrid environments. Today the container space is in an emerging phase with Enterprises experimenting with adoption but at the same time wanting to see the level of security, manageability and interoperability they need within their IT environment.

ContainerX has been around for less than two years, and in that time, the ContainerX team has demonstrated strong technical expertise in developing enterprise-class container management technology that works across a range of platforms. With today’s announcement, the ContainerX and Cisco teams will work together to continue to develop a comprehensive cloud-native stack for our customers.

Containers should be simple for customers to deploy and include secure, interoperable solutions that can integrate across the data center stack with existing infrastructure. Cisco is uniquely positioned to integrate the next generation data center with cloud-native and containerized environments that customers are demanding, all while still delivering advanced features such as security, analytics and management. With ContainerX, Cisco is continuing to invest in innovative technology and talent to help our customers in their transition to cloud native architectures using containers. This clearly supports our broader strategy to build and deliver secure hybrid cloud infrastructure, platforms, and services that offer our customers the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for their traditional and cloud native applications.