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ROUNDUP What happened in networking this week? One of the more interesting happenings concerns Cisco buying some data.

The acquisition looks unusual for Switchzilla: it's a data aggregator called Accompany, which boasts “millions of people and companies” and “real-time profiles for every single Fortune 500 CEO”.

Cisco said Accompany also has “AI-driven relationship intelligence” for turning up new prospects, which also seems slightly odd, since the company presumably knows the who-what-and-where of every important network in the world.

The acquisition looks less off-piste when you consider Accompany's founder is CEO Amy Chang, a former Cisco board member.

Chang will be made senior veep of Cisco's Collaboration Technology group, and in the acquisition announcement quotes CEO Chuck Robbins saying the acqui-hire acquisition will let Cisco “further enhance AI and machine learning capabilities in our collaboration portfolio”.

Cisco also farewells service provider video

As we reported earlier, Cisco's other M&A news this week was that the NDS business it bought in 2012 for US$5 billion, and turned into its Service Provide Video Solutions business unit, has been sold back to private equity outfit Permira – which sold NDS to Cisco.

OPNFV release 6 lands

We realise that product naming is a pain, but … who decided to call the sixth OPNFV platform release “Fraser”?

The Open Network Function Virtualisation project doubled the number of Kubernetes-based scenarios and added two containerised NFVs, and draws in Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technologies like Istio/Envoy (service mesh), fluentd for logging, Jaeger-based opentracing, Prometheus monitoring, and gRPC package management.

It also claims more mature testing, and Continuous Integration updates.

Fraser also added carrier features such as Doctor (a monitoring collaboration with OpenStack); Barometer's monitored items list is expanded and it supports more plugins; and Kubernetes has been added to OPNFV Calypso.

The Linux Foundation-supported project also added further Service Function Chaining, SDN VPN, FastDataStacks (FD.io's virtual forwarder), and Parser project features; and its IPv6 project adds clustering support.

News from Dell Technologies World

Dell-EMC added new switches to its Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) range.

The S4112F-ON switches include a version for 10 Gbps and 25 Gbps fibre Ethernet connections, and another 10Base-T version (10 Base-T? TEN? Dell-EMC, as you positive there's not a typo here?). Both versions include multi-rate 100 Gbps Ethernet ports, supporting 10/25/50/100 Gbps Ethernet speed.

(Actually there is a typo: an image caption makes it clear the release should have said 10GBase-T.)

The switches' support for ONIE (the Open Networking Install Environment) means users can install Dell-EMCs OS10 software or another network operating system of their choice.

Waves of nostalgia rolled over The Register's networking desk to learn that Dell EMC also used its Dell Technologies World conference as the platform to launch a new Wyse thin client.

The latest member of the company's Dell Wyse range, the 5070, targets users connecting to “Citrix, VMware, Microsoft VDI infrastructures and browser-based solutions such as Office365 and Google Docs”.

There are (pauses to weep …) two RJ45 ports, and you can choose between quad-core Celeron or Pentium processors, up to six 4K UHD display ports, a fibre or copper SFP port, eight USB ports (including one Type-C), and dual-band wireless.

Anuta cloudifies its ATOM

Anuta Networks launched a cloudy version of its ATOM (Assurance, Technology, and Orchestration for Multi-vendor networks) SaaS.

Hosting the software in an unnamed Tier-1 cloud, Anuta Networks says ATOM targets enterprise and service provider network design and provisioning, telemetry, analytics, compliance and service assurance.

The cloud version of ATOM lands in June, starting at US$950 to cover 50 devices. ®