Cisco Announced its Intend to Acquire Privately Held Isovalent

On December 21st Cisco announced their intent to acquire Isovalent, a company founded by creators of eBPF technology and leading solutions like Cilium and Tetragon.

The acquisition aligns with Cisco’s strategic vision of building a unique multicloud security and networking capability to facilitate customers’ digital transformation.

Cisco’s announcement discusses the challenges of networking and security in today’s distributed application environment and highlights the significance of eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology.

eBPF allows sophisticated software programs to operate at the kernel level without changing the operating system itself, enabling enhanced security, observability, and networking functionality.

Cisco’s decision to acquire Isovalent, which is already known for its successful Cilium and Tetragon solutions that leverage eBPF technology, further strengthens their cloud native connectivity offerings.

Cilium provides visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud native applications and is default in managed Kubernetes for major cloud providers.

Tetragon provides application-layer security controls to protect workloads across clouds. It includes also compliance capabilities.

Cisco’s decision to acquire Isovalent, which is already known for its successful Cilium and Tetragon solutions that leverage eBPF technology, further strengthens their cloud native connectivity offerings. 

The acquisition is in line with Cisco’s Security Cloud vision, which aims to deliver integrated security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with unified policies.

Cisco is committed to maintaining Cilium and Tetragon as open-source projects and plans to establish an independent advisory board for community collaboration and alignment.

By combining Isovalent’s expertise with Cisco’s Security Cloud platform, Talos threat intelligence, and powerful security analytics capabilities, Cisco aims to provide leading-edge protection for workloads on any cloud.

The integration of Isovalent’s technologies with Cisco’s software-defined networking solutions will enable seamless and secure networking from branch offices to data centers and public clouds, creating a continuous mesh network.

Hardware acceleration will also contribute to the industry-leading performance of the eBPF platform.

Looking Ahead:

Cisco + Isovalent will drive next-gen cloud networking and security innovation based on open source tech.

In summary, this acquisition significantly boosts Cisco’s capabilities around cloud-native security, network visibility and workload protection across on-prem and multi-cloud environments.

My Opinion

Here is my opinion on Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent:

I think this is a very smart and strategic acquisition by Cisco. Isovalent is a leader in cloud native networking and security, which are crucial areas for operating in modern multi-cloud environments.

The company’s work on open source technologies like eBPF and solutions like Cilium and Tetragon seem incredibly innovative and powerful for providing visibility, security, and networking control at the application and kernel layers.

Cisco has clearly had its eye on Isovalent and this technology for a while, having invested in their Series A funding back in 2020.

Bringing the team and technology in-house now accelerates Cisco’s cloud security vision and integrates nicely with existing Cisco offerings. There is a lot of potential synergy there.

In terms of open source and community alignment, Cisco’s plan to uphold Cilium and Tetragon as independent projects with an advisory board is encouraging.

This should allow innovation to continue while keeping community needs in focus. Cisco also has a good track record of managing open source software acquisitions.

Overall I think both sides stand to benefit here. Isovalent gains scale, reach and resources to drive adoption. And Cisco gets cutting-edge technology and talent that cements its position as an innovative leader in cloud-native security.

It’s clear networking and application workloads are rapidly moving to the cloud, so this seems like a strategic play at the right time. Kudos to Cisco on making a very smart acquisition.