Cisco Buys JouleX For Data Centre Power Control

Cisco Systems is paying $107 million (£70m) for JouleX, which makes products that monitor and manage the energy usage of data centre equipment.

JouleX’ Energy Manager, which gives a view of energy used by client devices, servers and other data centre equipment , will become part of Cisco’s Connected Energy Solutions business team and lead a new push for energy efficiency and the Internet of Things at the networking giant, the company said.

JouleX already on Cisco kit

jouleX has had previous investment from Cisco, and JEM is already offered as a free option on the company’s Catalyst switches, integrating with the company’s EnergyWise offering  As well as operating at the network level, JouleX has a JEM smartphone app which lets staff monitor their individual energy use

At Cisco, the connected Energy group, now to contain JouleX, will sit within the company’s Industry Solutions Group, and will report to David Goddard, vice president and general manager.

JouleX doesn’t need agents, separate energy meters or network re-configuration, said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president of Cisco’s Industry Solutions group:  “JouleX’s cloud-enabled, agent-less architecture will allow our partners and customers to quickly deploy this solution at scale in addressing their IT energy management needs.”

Founded in Munich Germany in 2009, by security experts Renee Seeber and Josef Brunner, JouleX is now based in Atlanta, and has Internet Security Systems (ISS) founder Tom Noonan as its CEO. Investors in the firm include Sigma Partners, Flybridge Capital and Intel Capital.

The firm has impressed analysts in the field: “There is emerging demand for energy management products that span an entire organization,” Andrew Donoghue of The 451 Group commented in a research report. “JouleX is well-positioned to meet this need.”

“Up to 50 billion objects are predicted to be connected to the Internet or interconnected machine to machine by 2020 as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology transition,” said Hilton Romanski, vice president and head of business development at Cisco, in a blog post.  “Many of those devices will be in constrained environments, where space, bandwidth and power will be at a premium. Cisco networks are differentiated by how we securely scale this type of environment and power consumption will be a key attribute of that differentiation in the future.”

Cisco has been aggressive in building up its software capabilities through both in-house development and acquisitions. In recent months, the networking giant has bought Intucell, which makes self-optimizing network software for carriers; security software maker Cognitive Security; cloud services management solutions maker SolveDirect; and network traffic software vendor Cariden Technologies.

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Originally published on eWeek.