Dive Brief:
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Cisco Systems announced Monday that it plans to buy Springpath Inc. for $320 million, according to a Cisco announcement. The two companies have worked together since early 2016.
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Springpath is a leader in hyperconvergence software and has created a file-system enabling server-based storage systems. The company also collaborated with Cisco to launch a fully integrated hyperconvergence infrastructure system called HyperFlex.
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The acquisition will be a significant investment in Cisco's data center portfolio, and the company believes it will go hand-in-hand with efforts to provide more software-centric solutions, said Rob Salvagno, Cisco's VP of corporate business development.
Dive Insight:
Cisco is on a mission to become more software-centric, and Springpath's solution fits well with that goal. The company is also focused on making data centers more powerful.
More than half of enterprises plan to use AI by 2018, according to a recent report from Narrative Science and the National Business Research Institute. But processes like machine learning, DevOps and AI require very powerful computing. Next-generation data center infrastructure technology is key to making that happen.
As a result, hyperconverged systems have a market forecast of close to $6 billion by 2020.
Cisco may also be looking to keep pace with IBM. In May, IBM and Nutanix announced that they will work together to enable IBM to deliver Nutanix's Enterprise Cloud Platform software on IBM's Power servers. Through their collaboration, IBM and Nutanix want to provide the types of data centers enterprises can use to make compute-intense processes possible.
