Monday, 6 April 2015

Cisco plans to expand SDN portfolio with Embrane buy

A small investment Cisco made in software-defined networking startup Embrane could lead to a new set of solutions for the vendor's SDN portfolio. Last year, Cisco invested $14 million into Embrane, but now the networking giant is looking to acquire Embrane to beef up its SDN solutions portfolio.
If the acquisition goes through (and there's a very good chance of that happening), Embrane will join the Cisco Insieme business unit. That makes sense, as several Embrane executives are former Cisco engineers. It's like coming home again.
The end goal, though, appears to be fusing Embrane with the existing Insieme offerings and making them part of Cisco's overall SDN strategy. Embrane Helios, the company's platform, deploys software-based appliances across commodity servers with the intention of providing enterprises with greater flexibility.
It's a good extension for cloud services providers, but it's also a potentially good tool for Cisco's enterprise customers, particularly those already interested in the Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure model and the rest of Cisco's existing SDN portfolio.
Embrane bills itself as a lifecycle management platform for ACI services. It seems like that fits right in with Cisco's overall product portfolio. Specifically, it should be interesting to see how Embrane's technology fits into Cisco's SDN portfolio.
Hilton Romanski, Cisco's senior vice president and head of business development, wrote in a blog post that Embrane will also add to the vendor's virtualization and automation solutions.

Reference: Chris Talbot (Fierce  Enterprise)

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