Both Ferrari and Cisco aren’t often used in the same sentence, however yesterday Cisco’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, revealed what he calls the company’s “most significant piece of networking” for a long time.

The Italian firm, Pininfarnia, has probed Cisco to make its new network switches as sleek as possible.

In an interview, vice president for enterprise products, Sachin Gupta, said: “We’re trying to make everything smoother and more ergonomic,”

“We wanted to leave no stone unturned.”

Cisco has spent several years and dedicated thousands of engineers to make a brand new family of switches. The Catalyst 9000 was built for the age of connected devices. Absolutely everything from lighting system and conditioning units are now connected to the networks.

Gupta has stated that he met four designers at Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, California.

However, even with design upgrades, its questionable whether the boxes will be mistaken for luxury Italian sports cars. Although Gupta has said that the real focus is primarily on functionality and usability. According to Gupta, the ejector handles are easier to access, and the internal fan can be located via the back of the device. This cuts way back on the amount of labour it required to fix the device.

All of the products were also processed through testing sessions in order for them to gain feedback for consultant implementations.

“It’s modernizing the experience for the hardware era,” Gupta said.

In the past, Cisco has worked with Pininfarnia in order to produce a firewall device in its security portfolio.

It will be interesting to see whether there will be future work in the pipeline for both Ferrari and Cisco. This partnership was definitely unexpected, but one some will be very excited about.

For more car partnerships and news take a look at our other blogs at, www.carsforstars.co.uk.