A10 Networks is a 12-year-old company that sells application delivery controller (ADC) appliances, but it’s making moves to diversify its business into cloud-based ADCs and also into security.

The public company based in San Jose, California, has almost 1,000 employees with customers in 72 countries. Its bread and butter has been ADC appliances. But in July it purchased Appcito, a company that created a cloud-native ADC.

Some specific functions inside an ADC, such as load balancing, are increasingly being virtualized in the cloud, so A10’s acquisition of Appcito moves the company beyond the traditional ADC market.

Bryan Meckley, a senior product marketing manager with A10, says with Appcito’s technology, when applications are sitting in public clouds, A10 can offer load balancing as a software as a service (SaaS) model. Customers will pay for a subscription service for their load balancing.

The initial launch of Appcito is designed for the public cloud. However, A10 is working on load balancing integrations with VMware’s NSX and Cisco ACI that will allow service providers that are building private clouds with those platforms to take advantage of A10’s software for load balancing.

“We went to the effort to be fully certified with Cisco ACI; same with VMware,” says Meckley. “A10 spent a lot of time on the open source. We’re deeply involved with OpenStack. A10 feels it’s important to embrace open source. It allows customers to use open source, but they need a vendor to handle the complexity.”

But even with its moves into virtual ADC (vADCs), companies such as A10 and its competitors F5 and Radware may find it hard to differentiate their vADC businesses from public-cloud providers, such as Google and AWS, that offer their own basic load balancing capabilities.

In August, A10 signed an original equipment manufacturing agreement with Cylance to imbed Cylance’s anti-malware software into some A10 products. The solution embeds the Cylance anti-malware engine into A10’s SSL Insight and Thunder Convergent Firewall. Available to A10 customers as an add-on subscription in early 2017, it will allow customers to protect their web and email traffic using scalable line-rate threat processing.

“This partnership is another example of the company innovating to differentiate themselves from other ADC competitors,” writes Dougherty & Company analyst Catherine Trebnick in a research note. “With the physical ADC market slowing due to high appliance saturation and a move towards virtualized/cloud-environments, A10 seems to be the player in the space that is best adapting to the changing landscape.”