Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Cmpute.io to help organisations get the most out of their multi-cloud deployments.

The acquisition, which is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s 2018 fiscal year, was announced on Cisco’s blog, with Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team, writing that the addition of Cmpute.io’s technology will “help customer optimise their cloud consumption to ensure optimal business value.”

Longer-term industry watchers may remember Cmpute.io in its previous life as Batch.ly. The company offers four paths to cloudy application optimisation; instance right sizing, putting instance types with the right application based on performance; cost and time saving; as well as availability, automatically balancing application workloads across instance categories.

This is by no means the first cloud-based buy made by Cisco this year. 2017 has seen the acquisition of SD-WAN provider Viptela, for $610 million back in May, while October saw $1.9 billion splashed out for cloud collaboration provider BroadSoft.

The importance of managing multi-cloud environments continue to be a hot button issue for organisations. A research study from BMC Software released last month found that for the majority of IT decision makers polled, current multi-cloud management approaches needed rethinking.

According to the research, cost optimisation was the most popular reason to go multi-cloud, ahead of increased agility and risk mitigation. “With a multi-cloud strategy, customers need to budget, buy, and consume differently,” added Salvagno.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.