Why this cloud network security company has no problem with change

Like pop mogul Taylor Swift, Aviatrix has had a lot of “eras” in its lifetime.

The Santa Clara, California-based company, launched in 2014, initially started out as a “networking-focused” company, according to Bryan Ashley, Aviatrix’s VP of product marketing. Over the next decade, Aviatrix slowly “morphed” into the network security company it is today. However, Ashley added that the company’s changes over the years didn’t happen overnight.

“We’ve been able to evolve our traditional networking solution and apply it to more of those security outcomes,” Ashley said.

In its latest chapter, the cloud network security company relaunched its channel partner program with a revamped strategy around how it incentivizes its channel partners.

“We’ve brought on…Anh Profiti, a really strong channel leader, and have built out the appropriate motions to be able to scale those solutions effectively and reach more customers,” he said.

IT Brew caught up with Ashley to discuss Aviatrix’s journey in the past decade, and the trajectory of the cloud network security industry.

The responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

I’m curious to hear about your impression of Aviatrix’s various eras. Do you think the company is just really good at adjusting to evolving consumer wants and needs?

I think the unique value that Aviatrix delivers is that we were very early on multicloud. We made big bets that enterprise organizations were going to go that way. We solved specific problems related to that, starting with network, but then through that we also started to look around the corner and see the security challenges. And so we’ve been able to evolve our offering to really try to help these enterprise organizations be successful in the cloud without having a dog in the fight as to which cloud they’re in.

Our goal is to try to solve the network enterprise and security challenges that are presented regardless of what cloud they’re in, and give them the flexibility and autonomy to choose wherever they want. And so it’s been fun to see Aviatrix develop across those eras.

In some cases, being the early bird is a great thing. In others, it could be a hindrance. How do you view it?

I think it was both, quite frankly. We made big bets that most enterprise organizations would be multicloud, whether they liked it or not. If you go back to 2014, probably up until Covid, not only were the [cloud service providers] telling enterprises, “Hey, we’ll take care of everything you need. All you need to do is come to us,” but the enterprises, when they realized how challenging cloud could be, said, “Hey, we’ve got to get our hands wrapped around one cloud before we can even think about another cloud.” So, they were really fighting it as well.

It was a challenge in that regard that we were early, but it was beneficial because once Covid hit, people went remote, and then all of a sudden there was this influx into the cloud for users and partners and other enterprise organizations. Suddenly, multicloud became a real thing. We were prepared. We had done the work based on that bet to make sure that we had feature parity across all of the clouds that we could learn about each of the individual clouds.

Zooming out, what do you foresee for the multicloud networking industry in the next five years?

What may have started as purely multicloud networking can’t just be multicloud networking. One of the things that we’re finding is in order to effectively introduce security that works at cloud scale and cloud speed is that security has to be baked into everything. So, that multicloud networking has to be infused with security baked in. Not just at surface level, not just with old protocols that we’ve used in the on-prem world, but in new ways that can support and understand and defend against the dynamic nature of cloud and threats. I still think it’ll very much be a thing. It’s a super interesting space to be and again, we’ll just continue to develop.