Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today announced plans to buy Plexxi Inc., a software-defined networking startup that has raised over $80 million from venture capital firms.

The financial terms were not disclosed, but the $267 million valuation Plexxi reportedly received after its last financing round may provide an idea of the acquisition’s price tag. The transaction buys HPE field-tested technology for managing the networking equipment in modern data centers.

Plexxi places a particular emphasis on hyperconverged infrastructure environments. HCI is the umbrella term for a category of systems that combine servers, storage equipment and networking gear with management software in a single package. This integrated approach aims to make day-to-day maintenance easier than in traditional data centers where the individual components are separate.

Plexxi offers two software products designed to further ease administrators’ work. The first, Plexxi Control, can automatically optimize networking gear based on the requirements of a company’s workloads. The other offering, Plexxi Control, applies the same concept to recalibrating the network when an organization changes its infrastructure. To top it off, the startup sells a series of switches specifically meant to work with its software.

Stu Miniman, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, noted that Plexxi’s HCI efforts have focused mainly on systems from Nutanix Inc. He said this may pose a challenge in the short term as HPE works to integrate Plexxi’s technology into its own HCI systems. According to Miniman, there’s a risk it could “lose momentum and get lost in the shuffles of HPE,” a potential issue the company will have to address.

Besides its hyperconverged systems, HPE also plans to integrate Plexxi’s software with another product family called Synergy. The series takes the idea of hyperconverged infrastructure a step further by letting administrators use software templates to provision just the right amount of hardware resources needed for an application.

HPE and the Plexxi team intend to share additional information about their plans in the coming months. In the meantime, the startup will continue enhancing the capabilities of its products. Plexxi unveiled a new update in conjunction with the acquisition announcement this morning that will bring expanded support for VMware Inc.’s data center virtualization software.

HPE expects to complete the transaction by the end of July.

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with Plexxi Chief Executive Rich Napolitano last year about the company’s technology and strategy:

Image: HPE