As growth continued in 2023, Aviatrix Systems in July hired Splunk’s former, CEO Doug Merritt, to take over the reins of the cloud networking startup.

Aviatrix creates a repeatable cloud networking offering aimed at optimizing customers’ cloud operational models alongside custom automation capabilities for each cloud provider such as Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud. The startup provides a cloud network backbone for applications by creating a simplified and consistent networking architecture in and across cloud providers to help customers focus on analyzing cloud data and understand their usage and cloud optimization options on an ongoing basis.

In May, the company launched its own Distributed Cloud Firewall that provides inspection and policy enforcement into the pathway of application traffic to eliminate the need to redirect traffic to other firewalls or security services.