By Tom Gillis, SVP/GM of Networking and Security BU

Today I’m excited to announce that VMware has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Avi Networks, a leader of software-defined application delivery services for the multicloud era.

Our vision at VMware is to deliver the “public cloud experience” to developers regardless of what underlying infrastructure they are running. What does this mean? Agility. The ability to quickly deploy new workloads, to try new ideas, and to iterate. Modern infrastructure needs to provide this agility wherever it executes – on premises, in hybrid cloud deployments, or in native public clouds, using VM’s, containers or a combination of the two. VMware is uniquely suited to deliver this, with a complete set of software-defined infrastructure that runs on every cloud, even yours.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are a critical pillar of a software-defined data center. Many workloads cannot be deployed without one. For many customers, this means writing their application to bespoke and proprietary APIs that are tied to expensive hardware appliances. The Avi Networks team saw this problem and solved it in the right way. They built a software architecture that is truly scale-out, with a centralized controller. This controller manages not just the configuration of the individual load balancers, but also manages their state. This architecture mirrors the approach of our groundbreaking software-defined networking solution VMware NSX. For this reason, we are very excited that the Avi team will join forces with the NSX team after the deal closes to completely redefine how networking infrastructure is designed and deployed.

Founded in 2012, Avi Networks pioneered a software-defined ADC architecture that is fully distributed, auto scalable, and intrinsically more secure, with real-time analytics for modern applications running in VMs, containers, or bare metal across data centers and clouds. The Avi Platform enables elastic load balancing, application acceleration, and security services combined with centralized management and orchestration for consistent policies and operations.

Unlike traditional ADCs, Avi Networks does not require custom appliances and can be consumed on-prem, in public clouds, or as a service, enabling new flexibility and faster time to value at lower costs. Built on REST APIs and plugins, the Avi Platform is fully automated and can be easily integrated with CI/CD pipelines for application delivery. With support for multiple clouds and platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, and VMware, Avi has been adopted by many enterprises around the world including Deutsche Bank, Adobe, Swisslos, EBSCO, ZOLL Data, Telegraph Media Group, and University of Leipzig among others.

Upon close, the VMware and Avi Networks teams will work together to advance our Virtual Cloud Network vision, build out our full stack L2-7 services, and deliver the public cloud experience for on-prem environments. We plan to introduce the Avi platform to our customers and partners to help enterprises adopt software-defined application delivery across data centers and clouds and continue our work with technology partners for interoperability.

On behalf of VMware and the Networking and Security Business Unit, I look forward to welcoming the Avi Networks team onboard and meeting our joint customers and partners.

For additional perspective, please read Shekar Ayyar’s blog.

Tom