Amid the rapid enterprise adoption of commodity switches, Cisco Systems Inc. is reportedly developing a new strategy to maintain its lead in the networking market.

Two anonymous insiders told The Information on Tuesday that the company’s plans revolve around Lindt, an upcoming operating system aimed at bringing the features of its high-end switches to lower-cost gear. The platform should put Cisco in a better position to compete with Juniper Systems Inc. and other rivals that have made their management software available on commodity systems. But while they share the goal of reducing hardware expenses for customers, Cisco is taking a somewhat different approach.

The company is designing Lindt to run not on white-box equipment manufactured by third parties but rather price-competitive models from its own switch lineup. More specifically, Cisco is focusing on systems that use mass market networking chips rather than the homegrown processors included in its high-end hardware.

The move could make a major impact on the company’s bottom line. The management features included in its premium gear constitute a core selling point, which means that making them available separately may remove the incentive for many customers to pay the extra price. In other words, Lindt has the potential to weaken one of Cisco’s most important profit streams, but it could also create open new avenues of growth in the process.

The tipsters who leaked the news Tuesday indicated that the platform will become available as a standalone offering, which should allow the company to take advantage the high profit margins available in the software business. At the same time, Lindt is set to make Cisco’s lower-end switches more appealing to small and midsized enterprises that currently don’t have access to its advanced management features.

The company is stepping up its efforts to target small and midsized businesss on other fronts as well. Today, Cisco introduced two budget-friendly wireless access points and a new controller to go along with them that can support up to 3,000 endpoints at once. The devices are joined by an updated version of its complementary Mobility Express management software that provides the ability to create “fast lanes” for mobile traffic, a feature developed with help from Apple Inc. as part of a partnership announced back in 2015.  

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