Cisco and Springpath have apparently been working together for a while, and this will let Cisco bring those teams in-house rather than having to build them from scratch.
Springpath’s specialty is hyperconvergence, and it has developed a distributed file system aimed at enabling server-based storage services.
Hyperconvergence is a term I’m still coming to grips with. Basically, it seems to entail taking all the virtual stuff we’ve seen driving the cloud revolution, and combining it back with the hardware again to condense everything back down into a one-stop-shop appliance that retains the virtualization flexibility provided by the hypervisor and such despite looking more and more like, well, a mainframe…
But I digress. Cisco’s move is another step down the path toward generating value from the software more than from the hardware, and $320 million is of course petty cash for them. The deal is expected to close in Cisco’s fiscal Q1/2018, which I believe would be by the end of October 2017.