Cloud networking provider Aviatrix Systems Inc. has a new chairman and chief executive officer: former Splunk Inc. CEO Doug Merritt.

Aviatrix was valued at $2 billion by investors in 2021. Since then, the market for cloud computing has been upended. Many cloud customers are delaying or cutting back on spending overall, eating into the revenue of companies like Aviatrix. At the same time, businesses continue to shift their applications to the cloud.

“The number of mission-critical applications in cloud is relatively small” and will grow, Merritt said. “The networking, and the networking security element, has got to follow.” Aviatrix’s products help customers’ systems — including routing, firewalls and logins — work smoothly across the various cloud services from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.