Cisco is deepening the public-cloud angle to its Intercloud strategy by acquiring startup Metacloud, a deal announced this morning. Terms were not disclosed.

Metacloud's software sets up a private, Metacloud-managed cloud on an enterprise's own infrastructure — kind of a cloud-in-a-box, but you provide the box. Its customers include Ooyala, the video streaming company being acquired by Telstra.

Metacloud uses OpenStack but has added technology to make clouds easy to deploy, says Faiyaz Shahpurwala, Cisco's senior vice president of cloud infrastructure and managed services.

Intercloud is Cisco's platform for managing workloads across multiple clouds from a variety of providers. Cisco bills it as a way to avoid getting locked into one provider's APIs — or, maybe more properly, a way to avoid having to decide which cloud's APIs to get locked into. The Metacloud acquisition would add Cisco-managed private clouds to that mix.

The deal comes at a time when some customers are pulling back from the public cloud — the opposite of the trend Cisco expected to see by this point.

"It's actually going back to on-prem now, because of security," Shahpurwala says. You can see it in the aftermath of the NSA spying revelations, as countries start setting up sovereign clouds, he says.

More generally, Cisco expects private clouds to spring up as an effect of enterprises embracing the cloud in general.

"Why do people go to the public cloud? It's speed and cost," Shahpurwala says. If a company can match those factors with an in-house cloud, it can disarm lot of the motivation for using a public cloud, he says.

Cisco expects the deal to close by the end of October, at which point Metacloud would become part of Cisco's Cloud and Virtualization Group, led by Shahpurwala.

Founded in 2011, Metacloud is based in Pasadena, Calif., with 36 employees. CEO Sean Lynch was previously senior vice president of operations at Ticketmaster.