Big data and cloud are drastically changing today's IT landscape. The proliferation of traditional and new data sources plus the movement of data to the cloud complicate a company's ability to access all of its data assets. This creates an important need to complement traditional data warehousing by providing a real-time, consolidated logical view of data, better known as data virtualization.

Today,Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire Composite Software, a market leader in data virtualization software and services. Composite's technology connects and optimizes many types of data from across the network and makes it appear as if it's in one place, allowing companies to make better business decisions. Together, Cisco and Composite will help to accelerate the shift from physical data integration to data virtualization.

For example, the NYSE Euronext produces billions of data per day through quotes, trades, orders, receipts. This data is housed in multiple locations. Composite provided a solution with its data virtualization platform, which functions as a virtual data warehouse to provide access to trades, orders, quotes and other data for analysis, compliance and reporting across 14 exchanges. With data virtualization's flexible data delivery infrastructure, the organization increased business responsiveness, improved the breadth of analytic insight and lowered its costs.

Consistent with our model for Next Generation IT, Composite will expand Cisco's portfolio of Smart Services and extend our next-generation services platform with software and hardware solutions. By connecting network knowledge (APIs) and programmability with Cisco's industry leading Unified Computing System, and adding Composite's software and query optimization expertise, Cisco will be well positioned to provide highly differentiated capabilities to our customers.

In addition, this acquisition reinforces our commitment to support partner consumption models and assist our partners in broadening their services portfolios.

This acquisition builds on Cisco's framework for a unified platform and our software services strategy with the recent acquisition of SolveDirect. Composite's data virtualization solution, combined with SolveDirect's process integration platform, will provide cross-domain data and workflow integration capabilities to enable real-time business insights and operations.