Dive Brief:

• Cisco announced Tuesday it intends plans to acquire ContainerX Inc., a company that helps enterprises integrate containers across data centers.
• The purchase is Cisco’s first acquisition in the rapidly emerging container market.
• ContainerX was founded about two years ago. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Dive Insight:

Earlier this month, Cisco announced plans to lay off 5,500 employees, or approximately 7% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring effort. A Cisco press release said the layoffs would enable the company to "further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data center and cloud."

The purchase of ContainerX falls into the "next generation data center" area of focus.

ContainerX is focused on "building technology to help enterprises manage, orchestrate and integrate containers across data centers," Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team said in a company blog. "Many of our customers are starting to use containers to build, deploy and manage cloud native applications."

The ContainerX team will join Cisco’s Cloud Platform & Services Group.

"With Cisco, we will continue to develop a comprehensive cloud-native stack for our customers," said Kiran Kamity, CEO of ContainerX, in a company blog.