Article link: https://www.ebpf.top/en/post/cisco_and_isovalent

On December 21, 2023, Thomas Graf, CTO & Co-founder of Isovalent, and Tom Gillis, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group, announced on their respective company websites Cisco’s plan to acquire Isovalent. The acquisition price was not disclosed by either party. Following the completion of the acquisition, the Isovalent team is set to join Cisco’s Security Business Group, with the acquisition expected to be finalized in the third quarter of the 2024 fiscal year. Cisco has a history with Isovalent, having participated in Isovalent’s $29 million Series A funding at the end of 2020. Subsequently, in 2022, Cisco, along with Microsoft, Google, and other companies, added $40 million in the Isaolvent’s Series B funding.

Cisco aims to enhance its capabilities in multi-cloud networking and security through this acquisition. The collaboration between Cisco and Isovalent will leverage the power of Cilium’s open-source technology to create uniquely advanced multi-cloud security and networking functionalities, aiding customers in simplifying and accelerating their digital transformation journey.

The Isovalent team is a major contributor to the open-source technology eBPF and leads the popular open-source project Cilium. The Cilium project, hosted by the CNCF foundation and graduating in October 2023, boasts maintainers from seven different companies and over 800 individual contributors. In terms of commits, Cilium ranks second in CNCF project activity, just behind Kubernetes. Leveraging eBPF technology, the Cilium project provides cutting-edge network and security solutions for cloud-native environments.

Isovalent recently introduced:

  • Cilium Mesh: enabling easy connectivity of Kubernetes clusters across hybrid clouds with existing infrastructure;
  • Tetragon: an eBPF-based open-source security solution providing visibility and enforcement of runtime behaviors on applications and networks;
  • Isovalent Enterprise: the enterprise edition of Cilium and Tetragon.

At the same time, Isovalent holds leadership positions in the CNCF and eBPF Foundation, further fortifying Cisco’s role in supporting the open-source ecosystem. Cisco has stated its commitment to continuing Cilium and Tetargon as open-source projects and intends to establish an independent advisory board to guide Cisco in contributing to these critical initiatives in a manner that aligns with the needs of the open-source community.

When a large company acquires a startup built on popular open-source projects like this, things may not be straightforward, potentially leading to directional choices within the community and large companies reliant on the software. Cilium supports some of the world’s largest Kubernetes clusters, with all three major US public cloud providers opting for Cilium in their hosted Kubernetes offerings. Additionally, major Kubernetes users such as Datadog, ByteDance, and Sky have placed their trust in Cilium.

The impact of this acquisition on the open-source community and the respective projects remains to be seen.

This acquisition marks the third known acquisition in the BPF technology circle, following:

Does the fate of startups based on BPF technology ultimately lead to acquisition by tech giants?