Cisco announced this morning it intends to buy Metacloud, a startup with OpenStack chops. This news comes hot on the heels of HP buying Eucalyptus last week and Rackspace announcing they are taking themselves off the market this morning. As Stephen Stills once sang, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Metacloud offers OpenStack as a service allowing customers to operate like a public cloud, but inside their own datacenters. The idea is to give companies that same agility, scalability and flexibility you get from public cloud offerings, but instead of being on the open internet, it’s inside a private data center.

Cisco will acquire private cloud player Metacloud, the companies announced on Wednesday. Based in Pasadena, California, Metacloud offers private cloud solutions for small-to-large companies, including startups and companies in the Fortune 100. Running an OpenStack-as-a-Service model, the company offers its customers ready-to-go private clouds in new and existing datacenters. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Metacloud’s employees will join Cisco’s cloud division on completion of the deal. Cisco said it’s buying the company in efforts to bolster its global Intercloud efforts, a network of clouds scattered around the globe which can be capable of meeting the needs of hungry cloud customers. The Intercloud strategy, announced in March, requires the enlisting of major companies working to standardize on Cisco’s cloud, based on OpenStack open source software.