Cisco said in a statement that Tidal Software's intelligent application management and automation solutions will advance its data center strategy.

"Cisco believes the network has become the logical platform to manage and maintain mission-critical applications," said Gary Moore, senior vice president of Advanced Services at Cisco.

"With the acquisition of Tidal Software, Cisco will accelerate its ability to help customers optimize the performance of their business applications and automate operational best practices in real time, which will lead to significantly reduced operational costs," he added.

Tidal Software is a privately held company based in Palo Alto, California, and Houston, Texas. Cisco said it expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its current fiscal year, which ends in July.

The purchase is the latest by the San Jose, California-based company, which has enjoyed spectacular growth making networking hardware such as routers and switches for the Internet and for corporations.

Last month, Cisco threw down the gauntlet to erstwhile partners Hewlett-Packard and IBM and announced it would begin building computer servers.

Cisco's move into building servers is part of its Unified Computing System (UCS), a next-generation data center platform for corporations seeking to boost efficiency and save energy costs.

Firms such as Microsoft, Accenture, VMware Inc., BMC Software and EMC Corp. are joining Cisco in the UCS project, offering their expertise in software and other areas such as "virtualization," which increases efficiency by allowing a single computer to perform multiple tasks.

Cisco also took another step into the consumer market last month, buying Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the hot-selling Flip Video camcorder.

(c) 2009 AFP