Dive Brief:

• Cisco announced Tuesday plans to purchase CliQr, an application management solutions provider for hybrid cloud environments.
• The company expects to complete the $260 million purchase in the third quarter of 2016. 
• Cisco already uses CliQr in a number of the company's data center switching and cloud solutions. Cisco said the accusation will help customers deploy the cloud, in private, public or hybrid environments. 

Dive Insight:

Cisco and other enterprise services companies have been betting on continued growth in hybrid cloud environments, which allows companies the flexibility to take a combined approach to the cloud, using both on-premise and third-party servers. Last week, IBM announced a partnership with VMWare focused around hybrid cloud.

A recent State of the Cloud Survey by RightScale found that hybrid cloud arrangements are the preferred cloud strategy, with 82% of enterprises reporting they had a hybrid cloud strategy.

CliQr provides customers with a single platform to manage applications across hybrid IT environments and allows them to move into the cloud, application by application, according to Cisco. With CliQr, Cisco customers can"easily manage the lifecycle" of their applications, according to Cisco.