During a recent visit
to France, Cisco CEO John Chambers committed to investing $100 million
in the country's innovative technology businesses, and it looks like the
networking vendor is already making good on that promise.
The company is now investing in and working with 6WIND, a
high-performance networking software business.
6WIND's technology
includes packet processing software, accelerated virtual networking
infrastructure software and IPSec software appliances.
The company uses software-defined networking (SDN) and network
functions virtualization (NFV) technology to boost the performance of
networks for enterprises, cloud services providers and
telecommunications firms.
"6WIND's networking
software enables a new paradigm of NFV and SDN use cases.
6WIND's fast growing number of design wins with key market players,
including Cisco, exemplifies its strong added value for the telecom and
networking industry," said Frederic Rombaut, head of Cisco M&A and
Investments International, in a statement.
It's interesting that
it's the head of mergers and acquisitions quoted in the press release.
It's easy to speculate that 6WIND could be a future target for
acquisition by Cisco.
The company has made no such announcement, but it would follow Cisco's
history of M&A – invest in a technology vendor first, ease it along
and then bring it into the Cisco fold.
The investment also
makes sense for Cisco because of its growing interest in SDN and NFV
technologies.
It's a long-term play for all networking vendors, but it's also
becoming a highly competitive one, particularly as the battle between
open-source and proprietary technologies heats up.
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