To help with the power portion of its much-hyped “Internet of Things” capabilities, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has proposed a deal for energy management solutions vendor JouleX.

According to a release on the proposed deal, Cisco would pay $107 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of JouleX. Cisco anticipates the deal to close in Q4 of this year. JouleX employees will join Cisco’s Connected Energy Solutions team under its Industry Solution Group, which is headed by VP and GM David Goddard.

JouleX, a long-standing Cisco developer, provides enterprise IT, data center and facilities software and on-demand solutions to maximize energy use. The vendor is based in Atlanta with a management team that includes multiple executives who worked at ISS, which was purchased by IBM for $1.5 billion in 2006.

In a statement on the proposed deal, Cisco said JouleX’s energy management solutions would work with its own EnergyWise offering to extend its wide-reaching data source connectivity plans and enable more cloud-backed, agent-free architecture.

“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,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, Cisco SVP of Industry Solutions.

In mid-May, Cisco beat earnings estimates on what it reported was a surging demand for data delivery via the Web. Cisco has been on a tear of acquisitions over the last 14 months, including U.K. networking vendor Ubiquisys for a proposal of approximately $310 million in April, as well as deals for Intucell Ltd. (reported $475 million), Meraki Inc. ($1.2 billion) and, in the biggest tech deal of last year, NDS Group for approximately $5 billion.

Smart-grid and utility analytics market is anticipated to grow from $15.3 billion in investments in 2012 to $23.1 billion annually by the end of 2017.

Justin Kern reports for Mergers & Acquisitions' sister publication Information Technology