What an incredible year it has been for Aviatrix, our customers, and our partners! A significant transitional year in many ways, we witnessed enterprises across verticals prioritizing ways to reduce cloud spend, investors rewarding “growth with a path to profitability” over “growth at any cost,” and finally, partners expressing a substantial surge in demand for multicloud solutions to meet enterprise requirements.
For Aviatrix, 2023 marked a momentous milestone as we successfully transitioned from our market creation phase to our market expansion and growth phase. A testament to this transition was attracting Doug Merritt, former Splunk CEO, to become our new leader. Doug’s presence is a clear indicator that Aviatrix is entering its next phase of growth. Throughout 2023, Aviatrix continued to achieve growth while adjusting to remain on our path to profitability.
Speaking of incredible opportunities, Doug himself expressed, “This is the most incredible opportunity of my entire career. Five months in, I’ve heard amazing stories from Aviatrix customers such as: ‘There’s nothing else like Aviatrix in the market,’ ‘Best support, bar none,’ ‘Would not have been successful without Aviatrix.'” These words from our valued customers highlight the passion and expertise that flows within Aviatrix.
One aspect that Doug has emphasized since joining is the exceptional talent we have at Aviatrix – networking and security experts who are trusted by customers to deliver the core cloud networking and security infrastructure for their business-critical applications. We continually receive glowing feedback from some of the largest and most well-known brands in the world. As we move forward into 2024, our goal is to ensure that we continue to earn the trust of more enterprises and help them reap the benefits of Aviatrix.
Gratitude to Our Customers
We are incredibly grateful to our customers and the champions within their organizations who have been nothing short of heroes. These champions have played an invaluable role throughout our market creation phase – they are the innovators and enlightened network and security engineers who understand the technical and business challenges their companies face and actively seek out solutions. We consider ourselves lucky that they found us, and every day we strive to earn their trust with our products, services, and support.
2023 witnessed significant expansion and new opportunities for many of our largest customers as they moved from initial deployments to full production rollouts. Central IT and cloud teams, having proven the benefits of the Aviatrix solution, and have begun offering those benefits as services to their company-wide business units. Furthermore, many of our champions were promoted or advanced their careers, bringing their experience and knowledge into expanded roles at new companies. This growth for our customers is a testament to the success they have found with Aviatrix.
Two key indicators of our broad customer engagement emerged in 2023. Firstly, our early adopter customer heroes formed The Cloud Network, a community to offer mainstream enterprises a proven path to success with the Aviatrix solution. Through this community, IT professionals can learn from one another and gain insights to maximize their cloud networking capabilities. Secondly, our industry-first multicloud networking and security certification, the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) Program, surpassed 25,000 certified associates. This program includes Aviatrix customers, partners, IT professionals, and students from all corners of the globe. We believe in investing in the success of our customers and the industry at large, helping our community excel not only in their current roles but also in their careers.
Market Validation
2023 has been a year of market validation for multicloud networking and security. Aviatrix has been at the forefront, leading the way as a game changer, innovator, and leader. We have faced competition, copycats, and critics, but true market creation requires more than just one viable choice for customers.
Cloud service providers (CSPs) have finally acknowledged enterprises have requirements for multicloud networking and security. Companies like Dell/EMC and VMware pivoted their messaging to embrace the multicloud approach, joining Equinix, HashiCorp, Wiz, Datadog, and Snowflake who – like Aviatrix – were already there. Perhaps the most significant validation comes from Cisco’s acquisition activity in 2023, which included several companies in response to enterprise demands for multicloud network and security solutions. These moves by industry incumbents reinforce the significance of multicloud networking and security.
Notably, 2023 saw a realization among customers, analysts, and vendors that networking and security in the cloud are converging. Traditionally, these areas were managed by separate teams and delivered as distinct products. However, the cloud has changed the game. Cloud network and security teams now work closely together, taking advantage of embedding network security into the cloud network data plane to apply policies and enhance security.
Aviatrix Products
In 2023, Aviatrix introduced the industry’s first Distributed Cloud Firewall (DCF) – a groundbreaking solution that redefines network security for the cloud. This innovative solution distributes policy inspection and enforcement within the natural path of application traffic, eliminating the need for traffic redirection to centralized firewalls. With a centralized programmable interface, creating and implementing policies across any multicloud environment becomes simpler and more streamlined. The Distributed Cloud Firewall enhances scalability, operational simplicity, agility, and cost-efficiency for any single or multicloud environment.
Within just the first six months of introducing the Distributed Cloud Firewall, over 10% of Aviatrix customers have actively adopted this new approach to network security. Many have replaced traditional centralized firewall deployments, benefiting from simplified east-west security while reducing costs, and even more customers have reduced CSP NAT Gateway costs, while improving egress security. Our customers and industry analysts have praised this solution, recognizing its cloud-native approach and game-changing potential.
“This is more cloud native than native cloud firewalls. It’s a game changer for us. Aviatrix has flipped the equation for network security in the cloud by distributing the inspection and enforcement throughout the cloud network to where the traffic naturally flows, rather than forcing traffic redirection to centralized inspection points. Aviatrix’s policy creation interface is novel and built for cloud, it abstracts multicloud differences and uses cloud native tags and attributes to define policies.” – Jason Simpson, Vice President of Engineering at Choice Hotels
“The cloud provides an opportunity to rethink networking and security. Aviatrix’s Distributed Cloud Firewall demonstrates that we don’t need to be constrained by yesterday’s network security architectures. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities of an always-on, always-secure cloud network.” – Mike Rothman, Cybersecurity Analyst
We also expanded our Edge solutions in 2023, offering Aviatrix Edge for Equinix Network Edge and Aviatrix Secure Edge. As the center of gravity shifts toward the cloud, our customers are seeking to extend the cloud operational model to the edge. Aviatrix Secure Edge solutions allow for consistent networking, security, visibility, and infrastructure as code automation between the cloud and edge locations, such as data centers and mid-mile colocation facilities. This extension of our capabilities opens up exciting new possibilities for our customers.
Partner Engagement
Our partner engagement witnessed a significant increase in 2023, as our partner ecosystem experienced a surge in demand for multicloud solutions. Our influential partners, including AWS, Microsoft, and Equinix, have deepened their engagement across all areas, including engineering, marketing, enablement, and joint customer sales. These increases in partner engagement are yet another validation of the market’s recognition of the importance of multicloud networking.
A Look Ahead
Embarking into 2024, we are committed to continuing to lead this market. Our customers trust us, and we encourage you to ask them about their experiences. As we move forward, we are excited to engage with more customers and partners, sharing insights on how other enterprises have overcome challenges, simplified cloud network and security operations, rearchitected network security for the cloud, and optimized costs for their businesses.
We wish you a Happy New Year and look forward to seeing you in 2024 as we continue to redefine the future of cloud networking together!
