Internet traffic has grown dramatically over the past two decades and is only going to accelerate. More traffic will be created in 2022 than in the 32 years since the internet started, according to Cisco’s recent VNI Forecast. This traffic is coming from people, machines and the way we use the internet. By 2022, 60 percent of the global population will be internet users and more than 28 billion devices and connections will be online.

With this environment as the backdrop, our customers are looking to address the unrelenting demand for more bandwidth driven by an emerging class of distributed cloud, mobility, and IoT applications. Simply put, the exponentially growing demands on the network require a new era of networking.

That’s why today we announced our intent to acquire Luxtera, Inc., a privately-held semiconductor company that uses silicon photonics technology to build integrated optics capabilities for webscale and enterprise data centers, service provider market segments, and other customers. Luxtera’s technology, design and manufacturing innovation significantly improves performance and scale while lowering costs.

As system port capacity increases from 100GbE to 400GbE and beyond, optics plays an increasingly important role in addressing network infrastructure constraints, particularly density and power requirements. The combination of Cisco’s and Luxtera’s capabilities in 100GbE/400GbE optics, silicon and process technology will enable customers to build future-proof networks optimized for performance, reliability and cost.

While much of the recent focus has been on our software transition, it goes without saying that world-class hardware, coupled with our investment in silicon and optics, is at the heart of our Intent-Based Networking strategy, enabling networking and security at scale powered by analytics. We look forward to welcoming the Luxtera team to Cisco upon completion of the acquisition, which we anticipate will happen in the third quarter of fiscal year 2019.