Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Andy Jassy has reportedly denied a report last week that the company is planning to muscle in onto Cisco Systems Inc.’s territory by selling data center network switches to its customers.

The denial came in a phone call to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, following the report that AWS was working on a “white-box switch” designed to compete with Cisco’s offerings.

“Cisco and AWS have a longstanding customer and partner relationship, and during a recent call between Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Andy confirmed that AWS is not actively building a commercial network switch,” a Cisco Systems Inc. spokesman told MarketWatch on Wednesday. AWS later confirmed the statement, MarketWatch reported.

The Information’s original story sent Cisco’s and other networking companies’ stock into a tailspin. Cisco, which is already fending off a challenge from multiple manufacturers of low-end white-box switches, saw its share price slump by more than 3 percent, while rivals including Arista Networks Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. fell by 1.3 percent and 1 percent, respectively. All three stocks have since rebounded on the news of AWS’ denial, with Cisco gaining 3 percent and Arista and Juniper rising by 1.4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively.

The original story sparked big concerns from investors because it was reported that AWS could price its switches about 70 to 80 percent lower than comparable hardware from Cisco. The Information said AWS would use cheap commodity components for its switches and come bundled with custom management software that includes built-in AWS integrations. A switch of this kind might appeal to numerous enterprises that run on-premises hardware alongside cloud infrastructure, since its ability to integrate directly with Amazon’s cloud would simplify many aspects of their information technology.

Amazon didn’t deny outright that it’s planning to build such a switch, just that it does not plan on selling this kind of equipment to other companies.

MarketWatch said the threat of an AWS white box switch to Cisco’s business was in any case probably exaggerated because it wouldn’t be able to provide the same kind of software and services support the networking giant can provide. It cited a note by Morgan Stanley analysts following the original report pointing out that other hyperscale data center operators, most notably Facebook Inc., have open-sourced their own white-box switch reference designs in the past. However, these designs have seen “little to no enterprise adoption” in the two years since they were published.

“The reason that impact has been minimal has tended to be that the ease of management is far more critical than the cost of underlying equipment,” Morgan Stanley said in the note.

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