Amid a flurry of Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) switching announcements arriving Wednesday, there's this: The company is pitching an alternative to Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).

That's amusing because back in the 1990s, MPLS started life as tag switching, a Cisco-proprietary protocol that eventually morphed into a standard. Now, Cisco is saying MPLS is too complex for some enterprises, so it's introducing a new, proprietary protocol. "It's kind of going back to where we started," says Craig Huitema, director of marketing for Cisco Data Center Solutions.

Cisco doesn't want to replace MPLS. The new protocol, Easy Virtual Network (EVN), is just for certain cases where an enterprise wants to create separate logical networks that all sit on the same physical network -- a request that's common in the age of virtualization.

It can be done with MPLS, but many enterprise staffs don't know MPLS, Huitema says. Cisco claims EVN is simpler because it avoids technologies such as the BGP routing protocol, which is what MPLS uses to promulgate routing information throughout the network.

EVN is being offered on the Catalyst 4500 and 6500 and the ASR 1000.

Cisco's announcement also includes some noteworthy high-speed line cards:

Why this matters
Cisco is still pushing back against intensified competition in the switch market from Arista Networks Inc. , Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Dell Technologies (Nasdaq: DELL), HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) and Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR). As Cisco found out in 2010, it can't ignore its fundamental markets, such as switching, for the sake of chasing more glamorous "adjacencies."

The data center is a hot market now, so every company has to keep pushing to get more out of its switches. One common front is to boast about new software that makes the network simpler to run, which is where EVN fits in.

For more
On Cisco, switches and the Cisco Live conference taking place in London this week:

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading