Cisco continues its acquisition, as the company announced that it intends to acquire Meraki (yet another cloud company). Cisco will pay about $1.2 billion in cash and retention-based incentives.

Meraki is a privately held cloud networking company based in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Mexico. Cisco says the acquisition will strengthen its Unified Access platform.

“The acquisition of Meraki enables Cisco to make simple, secure, cloud managed networks available to our global customer base of mid-sized businesses and enterprises. These companies have the same IT needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex IT solutions,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president, Cisco Enterprise Networking Group. “Meraki’s solution was built from the ground up optimized for cloud, with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.”

Last week, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Cloupia, a data center infrastructure software company.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013. Obviously, it’s subject to closing conditions and regulatory review.