Cisco to Buy Banzai Cloud, Its Latest Overseas Acquisition

Cisco on Monday said it plans to buy Hungary-based startup Banzai Cloud. The company’s mission is to simplify the development, deployment and scaling of complex applications based on Kubernetes.

Cisco didn’t reveal the purchase price.

The Banzai Cloud acquisition follows the purchase of Portshift, on Oct. 1, another Kubernetes-focused target. Portshift builds application security solutions that span a large portion of the cloud-native application life cycle. That span is from development and policy enforcement to vulnerability management and runtime protection. The Portshift acquisition gives Cisco cloud-native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes.

Cisco’s Liz Centoni

“These two cross-border acquisitions are a testament to the globalization of the cloud-native ecosystem and underscore our commitment to hybrid, multicloud, application-first infrastructure as the de facto mode of operating IT. The Emerging Technologies and Incubation team’s mission is to incubate impactful technologies and to attract, foster and grow the global talent needed to drive innovation and support our customers’ digital transformation initiatives,” Liz Centoni, senior vice president, emerging technologies and incubation at Cisco, wrote in a blog.

Modern Cloud-Native Applications

Modern native cloud applications are poised to displace monolithic applications in the dust. Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs exemplify this approach, as per the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Cisco expects the deal to close sometime before the end of January. The Banzai Cloud team will join Centoni’s emerging technologies and incubation group at Cisco. To date, for 2020, Cisco has targets and/or racked up six acquisitions, including Banzai Cloud and Portshift. Other acquisitions made this year include BabbleLabs, Modcam, ThousandEyes and Fluidmesh Networks.