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.
The press release didn't indicate how much money Cisco is investing in 6WIND.
