Cisco Intends To Buy Exablaze To Boost Switches Portfolio

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) recently unveiled intentions to acquire Exablaze — an Australia-based manufacturer and designer of advanced network devices.

Exablaze, which will become a part of Cisco’s Nexus switches portfolio, focuses on ultra-low latency networking with particular emphasis on high-frequency trading (HFT).

The collaboration is likely to aid Cisco in augmenting capabilities in next generation switch platforms and create growth opportunities for the emerging AI and ML arenas.

Exablaze’s competitors are Mellanox, Metamako, Solarflare, Moxa and others. Notably, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is exploring options to acquire Mellanox.

Exablaze’s Offerings to Complement Cisco

Exablaze offers the latest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology embedded with the required flexibility and programmability that suits environments where ultra-low-latency as well as high performance are essential.

These next generation products include FPGA-based switches, network interface cards (NICs), and picosecond resolution timing technology. The products help scale-out capabilities across a number of platforms such as HFT, AI, ML, high-performance computing (HPC), data center, cloud and edge computing as well as service providers.

In the HFT platform, time is an essential factor. Through the inclusion of Exablaze’s FPGA-based layer-1 capable switches and ultra-low latency NICs, Cisco’s current switching technology is likely to provide greater efficiency. The advanced FPGA based application will enable Cisco to cater to the needs of financial and HFT customers.

Exablaze will become an integral part of Cisco’s Nexus 9000 Series switches, which are capable of delivering high scalability, performance and energy in a compact form factor. The switches are ideal for data center aggregation- and access-layer deployments in enterprise, service provider as well as cloud networks.

Cisco Systems, Inc. Price and Consensus

Efforts to Boost Portfolio Bodes Well

Cisco has been quite active on the acquisitions front. Noteworthy buyouts of the company this year were CloudCherry, Voicea, Acacia Communications, Sentryo, Singularity Networks and Luxtera, Inc.

Markedly, the buyout of Acacia is likely to provide Cisco with high-speed coherent-optical interconnect products that are designed to transform networks linking data centers, cloud and service providers.

Partnerships have also played a vital role in expanding Cisco’s revenue opportunities. Markedly, the company’s 'Internet for the Future' strategy has enabled alliances for innovation with companies like AT&T (NYSE:T), Century Link and Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA).

Apart from these, the company has also been augmenting its portfolio through innovations. Last week, the company announced its custom Silicon One chip technology and new Cisco 8000 Series carrier-class routers. Cisco’s new Silicon One Q100 is already gaining traction among prominent companies with significant data center operations including Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) .

These strategic moves indicate that Cisco is stepping up its investment in silicon, optics and software to target next-gen networking.

Wrapping Up

Cisco’s moves are strategically in sync with growing clout of customized hardware among hyperscalers and cloud networking players as well as increasing demand for sturdy hardware infrastructure to support ML, AI-based automated workloads and manage exponential growth in data.

Cisco currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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