Cisco Systems Ltd. has made a statement of intent with the acquisition of software-defined networking startup Embrane Inc., following its $14 million investment in the firm last year.

In an announcement on its website this morning, Cisco said the move was about bolstering its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) efforts, and will allow it to “move more quickly to meet customer demands”.

Cisco’s ACI is the company’s answer to the fast-growing SDN trend, relying on a combination of hardware and software to build easily-optimized network infrastructures in both physical and virtual environments to enhance application performance. It’s a perfect match for Embrane’s Heleos platform, which can deploy software-based applicances like firewalls across multiple commodity servers using only minimal computing power, making it an ideal platform for cloud service providers that wish to deploy new and differentiated services.

By absorbing Embrane’s technology and expertise, Cisco will be able to expand both its ACI strategy and its underlying Nexus switch foundation, said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president and head of business development for Cisco.

“With this acquisition, we continue our commitment to open standards through programmable APIs and multi-vendor environments,” wrote Romanski in Cisco’s blog. “More importantly, we remain committed to the rich ecosystem of partners and customers in production through the automation of network services, cloud and system management orchestration and automation stacks.”

The industry has been getting excited about SDN and network-functions virtualization (NFV) for some time now. The technology promises more dynamic and agile networks by removing tasks like load balancing and firewalls from specialized hardware and managing them with software that can run on cheaper commodity hardware. So promising is it that some analysts have even speculated SDN and NFV may erode Cisco’s profits from its sales of high-margin routers and switches.

Companies like Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have retaliated by building more open switches that can run on third-party software, serving as an alternative to the white-box and bare-metal switches built by commodity hardware manufacturers. But Cisco continues to maintain that a combination of optimized hardware and software is the best way to achieve optimum application performance, hence its ACI strategy.

“We are pulling away from our competitors and leading in both the SDN thought leadership and customer implementations,” said Cisco CEO John Chambers at a conference call last February. “The market has recognized the benefit of ACI as compared to PowerPoint concepts of aspirational competitors. ACI and APIC [Application Policy Infrastructure Controller] will become the cornerstone of the next generation of networking architectures for many years, much like the UCS [Unified Computing System] has become in the data center.”

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