Brad Hedlund, a former Cisco employee who’s currently working with the now Dell-owned Force10, suggested in a blog comment that Dell is becoming ambitious in the networking space. In the post picked up by Business Insider, Hedlund said that the objective is to undercut Cisco’s prices on networking gear and offer the cheaper Force10 products. This could be a big leap for Dell, which currently focuses on selling servers.

Customers have been wondering what Dell would do with network company Force10 under the direction of former Cisco exec Dario Zamarian.

Before Zamarian joined Dell, each of these companies had their own piece of the data center.  Dell and HP had servers. Cisco and Juniper had networking equipment, like routers and switches. EMC had storage.

The latest trend is for each of them sell products that do it all in one package.

Hedlund’s explanation for what Dell plans to do with Force10 is one of the more conceivable speculations that surfaced. The hardware manufacturer has made some serious investments in Force10 lately.

In September the company announced plans to double Force10 R&D overseas, and in October it integrated with Oracle using the Dell Force10 Open Automation Plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c. The plugin introduces networking automation to the cloud management platform. In an interview in the Cube Force10 Chief Architect Mikael elaborated this topic, referring to virtualization as an enabler of sorts for greater network automation in the future.

Indeed, a large number of the major datacenter equipment vendors are venturing out of their home turfs. As Dell marches into Cisco territory, the latter is developing its own cloud strategies and agendas. This month the company brought some of its solutions together under the CloudVerse title, hoping to consolidate its cloud offerings.