[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Cisco is acquiring privately held Meraki.  Meraki will form Cisco’s new Cloud Networking Group.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $1.2 billion in cash and retention-based incentives to acquire the entire business and operations of Meraki. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory review.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., with offices in New York, London and Mexico, Meraki offers midmarket customers  on-premise networking solutions that can be centrally managed from the cloud. Meraki solutions support BYOD, guest networking, application control, WAN optimization, application firewall and other advanced networking services.

Meraki was founded by members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Investors in the company include Google Ventures, DAG Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

If you are a Meraki customer,  your license term remains unchanged, and the support, SLA, maintenance and feature updates continue to be included. You can find a FAQ about the acquisition at the Meraki website here.

[Image courtesy: Meraki/Facebook]