Valtix seems like a tiny deal. So I reached out to Steve Mullaney, the CEO of Aviatrix, who is also a Cisco veteran and experienced with M&A. I asked Steve why Cisco would do such a deal now, when everybody has been expecting the “big one”:
“Yes, it is a tiny acquisition. The real reason why now, and what is really interesting, is what Cisco said in their blog…” Mullaney wrote back in an email.
Here’s what Cisco’s Chopra said in the blog (emphasis provided by Mullaney:
“Across these multiple clouds, one thing stitches all of this together: the network. It is the one place that sees all the traffic that flows between applications and from applications to users, and therefore, is the only place where you have the visibility, telemetry, and policy enforcement needed for consolidated, consistent security.”
Mullaney pointed out that Aviatrix agrees with the philosophy, in general. As networking moves to multicloud, it’s no longer sufficient to have point solutions such as firewalls. You need to have the security baked directly into the networking fabric.