From the 'who should we buy today?' files:

Cisco today announced it was planning to acquire privately held Tidal Software. Cisco is paying $105 million cash and retention-based incentives and expects the deal to close by the end of its fourth quarter fiscal 2009.

Tidal Software has several application automation and management solutions that will fit into Cisco's overall application delivery strategy. The Tidal Intersperse application is a management technology for Java and .NET app servers while Tidal Enterprise Scheduler handles job task scheduling.  The Tidal Horizon product is all about automating the analysis and management of SAP operations which is something that Tidal complements with their Tidal Transaction Analyzer for SAP as well.

On the automation side, Tidal has software called, Tidal Intelligent Automation which according to Tidal,"..allows IT to easily create, modify, delegate, automate and enable guided operations. It also enables IT to automate, manage and audit critical IT processes within Windows-centric IT operations."

"With the acquisition of Tidal Software, Cisco will accelerate its ability to help customers optimize the performance of their business applications and automate operational best practices in real time, which will lead to significantly reduced operational costs," said Gary Moore, senior vice president of Advanced Services at Cisco in a statement.

From my point of view, the Tidal Technologies will also make a nice complement to Cisco's new Unified Computing Fabric servers and strategy. As Cisco ramps up with server blades, the need to manage and automate app processes is critical. That said, Cisco today has other partners, like BMC (and others) that kinda/sorta play in the same space. Nothing wrong with choice and a little co-opetition, is there?