I worked for Cisco for more than 13 years until I decided to join the Secure Cloud Networking leader Aviatrix. During my tenure I worked incubating and delivering several technologies such as SAN (MDS), Compute (UCS), Application (SAP HANA), Load Balancers (ACE, GSS), WAN Accelerators (WAAS), Network (Nexus), Assurance (NAE), and SDN (ACI). I got exposed to so many others but I haven’t had a chance to go deeper (Tetration, SDA, SD-WAN) as I did for Cloud ACI where my journey towards the cloud started.
My journey started a few years ago when Cisco launched an initiative called ACI Anywhere expanding ACI capabilities to help customers overcome network and security challenges on different locations inside an enterprise like multiple data centers, branches, and public clouds. I don’t recall the year but I recall I ran a Walk In Lab for Cloud ACI running on AWS on Cisco Live Barcelona. Cloud really got my attention and I was chosen cloud projects over on-prem: I was (am) angry to learn all aspects of it but in certain ways limited to my role and my company products and vision.
I was running several internal cloud related initiatives in parallel while helping customers. It was clear to me the challenges customers were going through or would face down on the road and how I could help them.
I got to know Aviatrix during a customer pre-sales engagement which forced me to study them:
- Cloud born and native
- Single controller
- Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba, Gov and China
- Supports overlapping IPs
- Rich set of Day 2 tools
- Tight Terraform integration
- End-to-End Automated Secure Transit Hubs with 3rd party vendors like PAN
- SD-WAN integration
- Leadership: Steve Mullaney, a 30-year veteran of enterprise networking and security, knew enterprises were going to embrace Multi-cloud and that they would need a uniform data plane as the foundation on which to integrate critical functions.
- Relevance and Market trend: Network segmentation, high-performance encryption, traffic flow & routing, secure ingress/egress and visibility on multi/hybrid clouds are out of the box features
- People: “people join people”. Aviatrix is attracting top talent from all around the globe.
My friends and colleagues (my wife too!) were curious why I left a successful company like Cisco for a cloud networking and security start-up called Aviatrix. I think that is pretty much it :).
It’s clear that the world is going to be multi-cloud and Aviatrix is the new “Cisco” of cloud world. It’s the “new normal”.
