"When Cisco and Juniper first said they were opening their router OSs, I thought that they'd be about as open as the iPhone. With Cisco's launch of IOS XE, I realize I was wrong: The iPhone is much more open.
"The update to IOS runs on the ASR-1000, Cisco's new edge router aimed at both enterprises and carriers. Aside from the usual improvements in bandwidth and power consumption, its main selling point is that it can acts as a platform for more than just routing, hosting multiple network services like a firewall, a session border controller and deep packet inspection..."