Cisco Systems is acquiring Portshift, which develops a Kubernetes-native security platform for application containers, Cisco disclosed today. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the purchase price was roughly $100 million, according to a Globes report.
This is M&A deal number 397 that ChannelE2E has covered so far in 2020. See the full M&A deal list here.
Portshift, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has the following company mission: To enable DevOps, Security and Operations to team up and utilize Portshift's identity-based workload protection for continuous security of their cloud-native applications.
Portshift develops software that ensures secure Kubernetes clusters, the company says. Key use cases include:
- Visibility
- Vulnerability Management
- Configuration Management
- Compliance
- Network Segmentation
- Kubernetes Network Encryption
- Security Automation for DevOps
Portshift raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Team8 in November 2018. Additional technology partners include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. It's unclear if the company has a channel partner program for VARs, IT consultants and MSPs (managed IT service providers).
Cisco Systems Explains Portshift Acquisition
In a blog about the deal, Liz Centoni, Cisco Senior VP and GM of IoT, wrote:
"Portshift aligns to Cisco’s approach of providing secure connectivity between users, devices and apps, wherever they reside; visibility and actionable insights from the end user to the application; a simplified consumption model that includes cloud-first Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capabilities; commitment to an open source and open standards philosophy; and breaking down the siloes between developers, security teams, infrastructure teams, operations and SRE teams."
The deal is expected to close in the first half of Cisco's fiscal year 2021 -- which generally means Cisco should official own Portshift before January 1, 2021. When the deal closes, the Portshift team will join Cisco’s ET&I group. Headcount figures associated with the deal were not disclosed.
Cisco Systems: Acquisitions and Business Evolution
Cisco continues to extend its business from traditional networking hardware toward SaaS-based services that extend across multiple clouds and on-premises opportunities. The journey has involved some business cost cuts along with multiple acquisitions.
Recent acquisitions include:
- BabbleLabs for WebEx video conferencing quality of service.
- ThousandEyes for multi-network monitoring
- Video analytics software company Modcam to boost Meraki MV smart camera business.
