Avi signs reseller agreement with Cisco for software-defined apps

Avi Networks and Cisco have entered into an agreement that will see AVI Networks' Avi Vantage Platform added to Cisco's portfolio, available as an annual or three-year subscription.

These subscriptions will be available as standalone, a la carte products or as part of Cisco's CSP 2100 bundle. However, Cisco explained that although the bundles address most use cases, some companies may opt to use Avi in public clouds and container environments rather than with the bundles and that's fine.

"Providing choice allows both Cisco’s and Avi’s partners and sales teams to offer the best solution to our customers," Gunnar Anderson, Cisco's CNSG product manager said. "We wanted to ensure that Cisco had the ability to sell everything in the Avi portfolio."

Avi Networks added that the partnership was the result of growing demands from customers for an elastic application delivery solution to help them meet customer expectations.

"Companies are overpaying for overprovisioned load balancers and underperforming networking tools," Edward Sharp, chief strategy officer and vice-president of business development at Avi Networks said. "With the Cisco partnership and the CSP 2100 platform, Avi Networks delivers ready-to-use and cost-effective application networking services to enterprises."

The partnership will leverage Avi Networks and Cisco's ongoing relationship that currently spans engineering, product management, and sales.

"Enterprises modernising their data centers are looking for elastic, virtual network functions for their applications," Sharad Rastogi, vice president of product management for Enterprise Networking at Cisco said.

"The combination of Avi Networks’ software-defined load balancing architecture and the Cisco CSP 2100 NFV platform delivers flexible, cost-effective, and turn-key load balancing services."