The networking giant Cisco on Monday announced its intent to acquire Budapest-based Banzai Cloud Zrt. Founded in 2017, the startup’s assets and team is the second acquisition by Cisco in the last two months. Just in October, Cisco acquired Portshift, a Tel-Aviv based cloud-native security company. According to the company’s blog, Banzai’s team has demonstrated experience with complete end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime and security workflows. The startup has built and deployed software tools that solve critical real-world pain points and are active participants in the open-source community as sponsors, contributors, and maintainers of several open-source projects.

As a part of the deal, Banzai’s Cloud team will join the Emerging Technologies and Incubation group

Its last two cross-border acquisitions of cloud-native ecosystem is a testament to the globalization of the ecosystem and underscore Cisco’s commitment to hybrid, multi-cloud application-first infrastructure as the de facto mode of operating IT. “As modern cloud-native applications become more pervasive, the environments in which these applications run are becoming thinner (containers, microservices, functions), increasingly distributed and more geographically diverse. Emerging cloud infrastructure technologies give rise to unique implementation challenges as the modern cloud-native application relies on the network to provide application and API connectivity and a runtime platform for an ever-changing cloud topology,” said Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President, Emerging Technologies and Incubation (IANS).

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of Cisco’s second quarter of financial year 2021. As a part of the deal, Banzai’s Cloud team will join the Emerging Technologies and Incubation group. They will be assisting in incubating new projects for cloud-native networking, security and edge computing environments for modern distributed applications, said Cisco.