Cisco to Add Start-Up Banzai Cloud Into Fold
Company offers development tools for Kubernetes, containers, and cloud
Cisco Systems continues to add to its cloud capabilities with its planned acquisition of Banzai Cloud, a Hungarian company that’s developing a Kubernetes-based operating system for containers and the cloud.
The Lowdown: Cisco’s decision to buy Banzai, which was announced Monday, comes a month after the IT tech giant said it’s acquiring Portshift, a 2-year-old Israeli start-up that’s building a security platform based on the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.
The Details: The Banzai Cloud and Portshift moves are part of Cisco’s larger strategy to transform itself from an IT hardware maker to a solution and service provider with a focus on mulitcloud and hybrid cloud environments, an initiative echoed by other established tech vendors to adapt to an increasingly application- and data-centric world.
In announcing the latest acquisition, Cisco noted Banzai’s work in driving solutions for cloud-native application development and deployment, including around runtime and security workflows. The vendor also noted the 3-year-old company’s work in the open-source community.
Banzai is developing a range of offerings in its platform, including:
> Pipeline: The platform’s deployment automation and execution engine.
> Pipeline Kubernetes Engine: Banzai’s Kubernetes distribution and runtime for Pipeline.
> Spotguides: A customizable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
> Backyards: Banzai’s distribution of the open Istio service mesh.
> One Eye: A unified and automated tool for log and metric collection for Kubernetes infrastructure, including cluster nodes, applications, and services.
> Bank-Vaults: A collection of security technologies that provide capabilities like automation, reducing the attack surface, and automatic token renewal.
Cisco didn’t release financial details of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of January. The Banzai Cloud team will be brought into Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, where it will help with new projects for cloud-native networking, security, and edge computing environments.
Background: Cisco has been working for several years to change how it does business to adapt to the roiling changes in the IT industry brought on by such transformative shifts like the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), the edge, and the skyrocketing growth in the amount of data being created. The company has switched its focus from up-front sales to recurring revenue from such plans as subscriptions and pay-as-you-go, and this summer CEO Chuck Robbins talked about Cisco’s plan to offer much of its portfolio as a service, an effort similar to those being pushed by rivals like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies.
The Buzz: “As modern cloud-native applications become more pervasive, the environments in which these applications run are becoming thinner (containers, microservices, functions), increasingly distributed, and more geographically diverse,” Liz Centoni, senior vice president of emerging technologies and incubation at Cisco, wrote in a blog post. “Emerging cloud infrastructure technologies give rise to unique implementation challenges as the modern cloud-native application relies on the network to provide application and API connectivity and a runtime platform for an ever-changing cloud topology. Addressing these challenges will drive developer agility and reduce friction so they can focus on writing code while spending less time managing the environments in which their applications run.”
Related Links: CHANNELNOMICS:
>Cisco to Buy Portshift for Container DevOps, Security
>Cisco Extends Reach Deeper Into the Hybrid Cloud
>Cisco Aims to Change Economics of the Internet
