Cisco built its success on routers to run the Internet, and it’s always looking for faster ways to move data. It’s latest strategy for faster switches is to buy privately held Memoir Systems.

The deal is the second acquisition Cisco has announced this week.

The networking giant, which operates its second largest corporate campus in RTP, is in the midst of making layoffs and realigning resources to capitalize on the “Internet of Everything,” as Chairman and CEO John Chambers describes it.

With more data, more devices, the advent of cloud computing as well as virtualization, and more competitors, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) is searching for better ways to handle Internet and enterprise traffic.

Memoir Systems will help, according to Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s head of business development.

Memoir develops intellectual property and tools for chip developers that Romanski says enables vendors “to build programmable network switches with increasing speeds.”

Cisco needs Memoir to help develop “innovations necessary to meet next-generation IT requirements.”

“Currently in the data center switching market, denser infrastructure and data-intensive workloads are driving demand for higher port density (feeds) and greater bitrates (speeds),”  Romanski wrote in a blog.”At the same time, the accelerating growth of scale-out (non-virtualized) Big Data applications like Hadoop are driving increasing East-West data traffic – furthering the need for greater data center network density. Unfortunately, the physical memory in typical ASIC switch chips cannot cope with the design requirements for these more intense needs and as a result, can become the bottleneck that limits the density and performance of future data center switches.

“To help solve the ASIC memory issue, Memoir currently licenses soft-logic IP, which speeds up memory access by up to 10 times. It also reduces the overall footprint this memory takes up in typical switch ASICs. As a result, this technology allows the development of switch and router ASICs with speeds, feeds, and costs typically not possible with traditional physical memory design techniques. This differentiation is critically important as port densities and port speeds move from 10G to 40/100G.”

The deal is expected to close in coming months.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed.