A10 Networks forays into Application Delivery Cloud tech with Appcito buy

by Abhinav Mohapatra

California-based A10 Networks that went public in March 2014 and raised $187.5 million has forayed into the application delivery control (ADC) space after acquiring Appcito, a SaaS based application delivery solution provider for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. However, the purchase price for the shake of hands has not been publicly disclosed yet. A10 Networks that offers networking and security solutions for systems administration, positions the acquisition as a strategic step in the company’s vision to “help customers become more secure and agile as they bridge traditional and cloud application environments.” The merger between both A10 networks and Appcito marks the expansion of A10’s Harmony Solution for secure application services. According to company website, the Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) Harmony architecture which was introduced earlier in 2015, was built to maximize the performance of the most expensive system resources, processors and memory, allowing customers to meet rapidly growing application networking and security requirements. It also claims to offer services to a client roster including Fujitsu and Box. Lee Chen, CEO, A10 Networks, said:
“This is a strategic acquisition for our customers. We are helping our customers become both ‘cloud-ready’ and ‘cloud-native.’ We are giving them cutting-edge capabilities to control secure application services delivery across their data centers and clouds, such as in the area of analytics and automation. We are very excited about how Appcito fits into our vision to become the most comprehensive secure application services company in the industry.”
Reportedly, the joint offerings, post-acquisition, will include a cloud services controller for centralized application policy management and orchestration, elastic application traffic management capabilities integrated with DevOps processes, application visibility and analytics, and support for microservice and container-based applications, all of which will be available this year. Appcito was co-founded by Kamal Anand and Alak Deb in 2013 and since has participated in only 1 round of funding in December, 2014 where it raised $7.5 Million funding from The Fabric March Capital Partners. It had originally named its core product platform as CAFE, the Cloud Application Front End (CAFE) and was designed for Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenStack, VMware, Microsoft Azure and other public, private and hybrid clouds. It was later rebranded to Appcito Application Delivery System (ADS). Kamal Anand, CEO and Co-founder, Appcito, stated:
“Appcito was founded with a vision to deliver cloud-native application delivery services and help application teams become more nimble, while delivering application performance and security that their end users demand. Becoming part of A10 Networks and their customer-focused innovation culture will bring added benefits to application teams. The acquisition makes solid sense for customers wanting to collectively manage traditional on-premise and cloud application needs.”
Anand also took to Twitter and wrote: