Cisco announced today that it's paying $260 million in cash and has assumed equity awards for CliQr Technologies, a five-year-old, privately held company based in San Jose, Calif., that helps enterprises manage applications on multiple clouds.

“We believe the company raised $38 million in venture capital,” states UBS analyst Steven Milunovich in a research note issued this morning. CliQr was created by former VMware executives and has about 100 employees.

CliQr provides a cloud orchestration platform to deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualized, and container environments.

Cisco says the acquisition will help its customers accelerate their private, public, and hybrid cloud deployments and manage their applications across all those clouds.

According to a RightScale cloud survey conducted in January, enterprises are using, on average, three public clouds and three private clouds, and they’re increasing adoption of both.

CliQr is already integrated with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS). ACI, seen by many as Cisco’s software-defined networking (SDN) offering for data center and cloud networks, emerged from Cisco's acquisition of Insieme.

In addition to supporting Cisco’s UCS and ACI, CliQr supports VMware vSphere and vCloud Director, as well as OpenStack. CliQr also supports all major public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and IBM’s SoftLayer.

When the deal closes in the third quarter, the CliQr team will join Cisco’s Insieme business unit, reporting to Senior Vice President and General Manager Prem Jain.

“We view the acquisition as a technology tuck-in that bolsters Cisco's ACI and Intercloud initiatives while providing a pathway for broader adoption of CliQr within large enterprises,” UBS's Milunovich writes.

This is Cisco’s second acquisition in 2016. In February it announced it was buying Internet of things (IoT) startup Jasper Technologies for $1.4 billion.