Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) has planned announcements tomorrow regarding application infrastructure. Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew S. Robison expects the announcements to be related to the company’s acquisition of Insieme.
Insieme develops with Cisco’s funds
Insieme is a startup that’s been funded by Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) for about two years now, and Robison reports that the company is now beginning to yield products. He expects the announcements tomorrow to be about a new line of SDN data center switches from Insieme. Cisco refers to them as Application Centric Infrastructure.
The analyst believes the new products will be a major breakthrough for SDN, incorporating a number of industry firsts. He believes Insieme can take care of the challenges associated with distributed data and control plane functionality, both of which are important to SDN.
Expected features of Cisco’s new products
According to Robison, one of Insieme’s distinctions is enabling reliability or fail-over if control or data plane elements are lost for some reason. He says that by addressing certain challenges, Insieme has built an architecture which “allows unprecedented flexibility,” including the ability to load anc change network rules at the drop of a hat.
He expects the new product family to have data plane products which use Broadcom’s Trident II switch ICs, which are used by many competitors. However, he believes they will also use internally developed ASICs. He also believes they will offer “unique functional partitioning,” compared to competitors who rely on merchant IC technology.
The analyst apparently has very high expectations for tomorrow’s announcement, saying that the new productions should offer “a different level of solution.” He notes that there have been “some competitive efforts” to distract from Cisco’s announcement tomorrow, particularly through talk about conventional switching metrics. He believes Cisco will go beyond speeds, latency and port-count and instead show how ACI provides new network deployment capabilities.
Robison continues to rate Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) as a Buy with a $28 per share price target. Cisco shares rose more than 2% during regular trading on Tuesday.
