Cisco Systems to acquire ultra low-latency networking company Exablaze

There is a huge demand among innovators for their work in decoupling routing software from its underlying hardware, i.e a new routing architecture while many countries are trying hard to enter the 5G space. Startups played a pivotal role in disrupting the business of network switching. Today, they are on track to do the same to routing.

The need is not only limited to the 5G players but also to the Cloud service providers, SaaS providers, telcos and the largest financial institutions, who are the most likely candidates for deploying the networking startups' technology in the data center and at the edge.

Network capacity and speed are today’s bread and butter for data intensive, highly transactional-based businesses requiring optimized bandwidth performance in industries and market segments like high-frequency trading (HFT), financial services, high-performance computing, and emerging AI/ML clusters.

To address this segment, Cisco had planned to combine Silicon One with low-latency network interface cards from Exablaze(a privately held, Australia-based designer and manufacturer of advanced network devices) and plans to acquire it by the end of April 2020. The combination could produce exceptionally fast switches and routers to compete with other telco suppliers, including Ericsson, Juniper Networks, Nokia and Huawei.

Exablaze has aimed at reducing latency and improving network performance. Integrating Exablaze’s innovative products and technology into the Cisco portfolio will give customers the latest field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, providing them with the flexibility and programmability they require.

Cisco is committed to delivering best of breed platforms as the foundation of its Intent-Based Networking strategy. Together, Cisco and Exablaze will accelerate next generation low latency solutions for Intent-Based Networks.

Low latency replication of data from one source to many destinations (1:N) is necessary for many datacenter, telecommunications and monitoring applications. For example, financial trading applications often require market data to be distributed to a number of participants at extremely low latency and low jitter.

Exablaze products provide scale-out capabilities that are designed to seamlessly expand and adapt to meet a wide variety of requirements that include next-generation applications in high-frequency trading (HFT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), high-performance computing (HPC), Data Center, cloud and edge computing, and Service Providers.