Cisco announced on Wednesday its intent to acquire IT engergy management company JouleX. Cisco says the Atlanta-based company complements its existing portfolio by using capabilities of its network to gain visibility into and control energy usage across global IT environments.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco will pay about $107 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of JouleX.

“JouleX’s technology will strengthen Cisco Services’ Smart Offerings and complements our evolving services strategy. It extends our ‘Internet of Things’ capabilities and is a good alignment to Cisco EnergyWise,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president, Industry Solutions. “With network-enabled devices increasing exponentially, our partners and customers are asking for this solution today to operationalize their energy management capabilities in the network and reduce cost. 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.”

Cisco VP and Head of Business Development, Hilton Romanski had this to say on in a blog post:

IT energy consumption is one of the largest unmanaged expenses and as a result organizations are seeking effective solutions to measure usage, improve optimization, and produce sustainability reports. 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. 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. JouleX is a natural extension of IoT, one of the many technology transitions that make up the Internet of Everything.

The acquisition of JouleX exemplifies Cisco’s innovation framework and supports Cisco’s five foundational priorities by enhancing our service offering across all customer segments and advancing our business and technology architecture. The JouleX acquisition is aligned to Cisco’s goals of developing and delivering innovative energy management solutions that streamline data and work flow across a unified network.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.