Methods and apparatus for intelligent sharing and tighter integration between a service engine (SE) for network communication and a high-speed forwarding device, such that certain network flows may be offloaded from the SE to benefit from the high-speed forwarding capacity of such a device are provided. To accomplish the integration, an application binary interface (ABI) may be employed as an in-band high-priority communication protocol between the data planes of the SE and the high-speed forwarding device, and an application programming interface (API) may be utilized to leverage the ABI and any in-band or out-of-band channel to allow the master SE to control the high-speed slave device. Such integration techniques are not limited to a few specialized hardware components, but may also be applied to other types of hardware resources, such as flow tables, quality of service (QoS) tables, access control list (ACL) tables for security, forwarding and adjacency tables, etc.