News

Cisco Backs New-Generation Networking Company

• By David Ramel
• 07/09/2015

Cisco Systems Inc. this week invested in a French company, 6WIND, a specialist in helping enterprises deploy software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies in existing datacenter setups.

The move furthers Cisco's complicated relationship with new-generation networking technologies that threaten traditional networking companies. Of those, Cisco has been identified by many observers as the company in the most dire danger of being disrupted. Cisco is threated by key tenets of the upstart approaches that contrast with Cisco's old-guard philosophy of integrated, proprietary systems. These modern approaches espouse an open versus proprietary philosophy and the moving of network intelligence from proprietary, customized hardware to bare-metal (or white-box) devices. Cisco has at times seemed to reject the movement, propose its own proprietary alternatives and then embrace it, if tentatively.

Cisco in the last few years has developed its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) as an SDN-flavored alternative to the totally open approach. ACI uses Cisco's proprietary Nexus 9000 switches and its Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).

With key customers and the industry in general moving to the modern alternatives that promise more network programmability and agility, however, Cisco has invested more and more in mainstream SDN/NVF.

The latest investment comes as part of a broader initiative to invest in French businesses, but it could serve as a harbinger of things to come. Just a few months ago, Cisco announced it was acquiring Silicon Valley SDN startup Embrane -- after it had invested in the company last year.

"Cisco Investments has made an investment in 6WIND, a Parisian start-up, whose software solves performance challenges for network vendors in telecom, enterprise and cloud infrastructure markets," Cisco said this week in a statement. "6WIND creates new market opportunities for NFV and SDN, and creates industrial applications and IP-based communications systems. Cisco is directly supporting start-ups by providing infrastructure solutions that deliver high-speed broadband and smart grids throughout the country."

There were no indications that Cisco's investment move would follow the Embrane model with a subsequent acquisition, but some industry pundits described it as a strategic move to arm itself in the SDN/NFV war with competitors such as HP.

Here's how 6WIND framed the move. "The networking and telecom industries are undergoing a significant transformation due to huge volumes of data that necessitate advances with virtualization on standard servers through NFV and SDN," the company said in a news release this week. "As a result, the networking and telecom industries can realize similar benefits delivered from the Internet with cloud computing and datacenter virtualization to stay competitive through cost savings, scalability and flexibility. With the transition to new-generation architecture, it is critical to deploy the proper software on servers to ensure performance and functionality rivals legacy specialized equipment."

6WIND said its software provide the following benefits:

• It enables the network architecture transition by delivering the performance, features and network hardware independence required for virtual networking on standard servers, without changing the existing software infrastructure.
• It addresses broad market convergence across service providers, datacenters and enterprises.
• It's already deployed in critical applications for Blue Chip companies and achieves fast revenue growth with teams around the world.

"We are proud to have Cisco, the largest networking company in the world, as an investor, which is a testament to the critical technology 6WIND provides to enable the transition to NFV and SDN," said 6WIND CEO Eric Carmes. "With this investment, we look forward to further advancing our technology innovation and world-wide growth to accelerate the networking and telecom industry transformation."

Terms of the investment weren't disclosed.