Cisco To Buy Banzai Cloud, Boosting Rapidly Emerging Cloud-Native Portfolio

The deal for the Hungarian startup comes on the heels of the acquisition of Portshift. Staff from both startups are bolstering a team of Kubernetes specialists developing new cloud-native networking and security technologies under Cisco’s roof.

Cisco looked to boost a rapidly expanding portfolio of cloud-native technology developing under its roof Monday with its second deal for an international startup focused on Kubernetes since last month.

The agreement to buy Hungary-based Banzai Cloud is expected to close at the end of this quarter for an undisclosed price.

Banzai will add to a slate of emerging technologies being nurtured within the networking giant’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, the team incubating projects around cloud-native networking, security and edge computing environments for modern distributed applications.

The startup founded in 2017 fits in well with Cisco’s vision of amassing talent from around the world to drive innovation around enterprise digital transformations, blogged Liz Centoni, senior vice president for Cisco Strategy and Emerging Technology & Incubation.

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“This team has demonstrated experience with complete end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime and security workflows. They have built and deployed software tools that solve critical real-world pain points and are active participants in the open-source community as sponsors, contributors and maintainers of several open-source projects,” Centoni said of Banzai.

The Banzai acquisition comes on the heels of a reportedly $100 million deal last month to buy Portshift, an Israeli startup focused on application security for cloud-native development environments.

The two “cross-border acquisitions are a testament to the globalization of the cloud-native ecosystem and underscore our commitment to hybrid, multi-cloud application-first infrastructure as the de facto mode of operating IT,” Centoni said.

Cisco committed a few weeks back at its Partner Summit to accelerate development of its cloud portfolio, said Kent MacDonald, senior vice president for strategic alliances at Long View Systems, a Cisco-partner based in Calgary.

Banzai will further build on Cisco’s network and security strengths, MacDonald said.

“Cisco is well positioned to be the leader to ‘Connect and Protect’ migration to the cloud which is a key initiative for virtually all our customers,” MacDonald told CRN.