Weekly Wrap for Jan. 24, 2020

Plus, IBM scores a $1B bank deal, and a former Verizon exec launches a new security startup

Big Switch will bolster Arista's enterprise play; IBM taps Red Hat as part of a bank IT overhaul; and Privafy goes after Palo Alto, VeloCloud.

Arista Networks Buys Big Switch

IBM Secures $1.1B Contract With Banco Sabadell

Verizon Exec Launches Privafy, Challenges Firewall, SD-WAN, VPN Vendors

SDxCentral Weekly Wrap Podcast Full Transcript

Today is January 24, 2019, and this is the SDxCentral Weekly Wrap where we cover the week’s top stories on next-generation IT infrastructure.

This week’s episode of the Weekly Wrap is sponsored by Silver Peak. Learn more about the Silver Peak SD-WAN solution.

Arista Networks is buying SDN vendor Big Switch Networks in a move that will fill a big hole in Arista’s current cloud portfolio.

Sources told SDxCentral that the deal is the biggest in Arista’s history, though exact financial terms were not known.

The deal will integrate Big Switch’s Big Monitoring Fabric hybrid cloud visibility and security product into Arista’s enterprise platform.

This is important as enterprise customers increasingly adopt multi-cloud environments and need tools to monitor and orchestrate workloads across their data centers and in public clouds.

It also puts Arista in a better position to more directly compete against Cisco and its multi-cloud play.

Sources noted that Big Switch had a long list of suitors it was speaking with over the past several months that wanted to bring its technology in house.

The interested parties included several incumbent networking players like Cisco, Dell Technologies, VMware, Juniper Networks, and Extreme Networks.

Big Switch previously partnered with Dell on its open networking product line, which takes aim at proprietary vendors including Arista and Cisco.

The deal is Arista’s third acquisition following its purchase of cloud-managed WiFi firm Mojo Networks and low-latency field programmable gate away provider Metamako in mid-2018.

IBM this week scored a 10-year, $1.1 billion contract to help Spain’s Banco Sabadell modernize its IT infrastructure and migrate its applications to the cloud.

The agreement calls for IBM to migrate the financial institution’s existing applications to a hybrid cloud environment while helping the company keep up with security and regulatory requirements.

IBM will leverage several assets from its recently acquired Red Hat business, including the Kubernetes-focused OpenShift platform.

This will allow the bank to deploy an on-container architecture, cloud-native applications,