Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney, who is the former CEO at Nicira and senior vice president of networking and security at VMware, came out of retirement to lead the public cloud networking startup. He calls it the “biggest opportunity I have ever seen in my life.”

How big? Bigger than Nicira, which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion in 2012, and then used as the basis for its NSX network virtualization platform, Mullaney said. “I was CEO of Nicira, and we started this whole SDx craze.”

NSX now boasts a $2 billion run rate and stretches from the data center to the edge and the cloud. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger called it his No. 1 priority for 2019: “Obviously I love my vSAN [virtual storage] child. It’s not as important as my NSX child,” Gelsinger said. Mullaney led the NSX product line during his five years at VMware following the Nicira acquisition.

Aviatrix’s opportunity is even bigger than Cisco, Mullaney added, comparing what Aviatrix is doing for public cloud networking to what Cisco did in the early ’90s to help enterprises build their networking and security infrastructure.

“I look at Aviatrix and I see this is 10 times, 20 times, 100 times that,” he said. “Someone is going to fill this void. I’m not back for a couple-billion-dollar acquisition. This is about the size of an opportunity.”

Mullaney didn’t hate retirement. He wasn’t bored or looking to get back into the game.

“I was living the dream, loving my life, traveling, keeping engaged strategically” by sitting on various companies’ boards including Tigera and Aviatrix, he said. “But then the world changed.”

Instead of just talking about moving to the public cloud, mainstream enterprises started actually doing it. “The herd was now moving,” Mullaney said. “They all decided on the same morning, on the same day, we’re doing it. Everything on prem is an expense. We’re going to shut down our data centers” and move to the cloud.

“I just looked at this and went, ‘Oh. My. God.’ I’m looking at this thousand-foot wave coming into shore and I said, ‘how could I not participate in that?’ This is the biggest opportunity I have ever seen in my life and I couldn’t just sit back and watch. I’ve got to try to ride that.”

Aviatrix, founded by ex-Cisco network engineer Sherry Wei in 2014, developed software-defined cloud routing technology with the intent of making cloud networking as simple and dynamic as cloud storage and compute.

It released its first cloud networking product in 2015, which lets customers build their own encrypted networks in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It also allows them to scale and migrate workloads from on-premises sites to these virtual private clouds (VPCs) from a software-defined, centrally managed controller.

A year ago it launched a hosted service to build and manage VPC networks in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

And this week it announced a new product called Firewall Network Service to deploy next-generation firewalls in public clouds. The service initially focuses on Palo Alto Networks VM-Series firewalls with AWS Transit Gateway. It removes the need to use IPSec tunneling for route propagation and packet forwarding.

The company claims this increases network throughput to the firewall by more than 1,000% and removes the visibility loss that happens when forced to perform source network address translation (SNAT) at the firewall.

The firewall service is centrally managed by Aviatrix’s controller, which provides orchestration and control of native cloud services through the AWS Transit Gateway interconnecting VPCs and on-premises networks.

“We make it very easy for customers to bring their Palo Alto Networks firewalls into the cloud by orchestrating things and making it scalable,” said Rod Stuhlmuller, VP of marketing at Aviatrix. The service also lets companies “apply the policies and the rules that they are used to applying on premises and bring that to the cloud.”

Stuhlmuller is a new addition to the company’s management team. Before Aviatrix, he was the senior director of product marketing for VMware’s Network and Security Business Unit, and he held the same role previously at Nicira.

Aviatrix announced the new hires — Mullaney and Stuhlmuller, along with new COO John Jendricks, former VP of business operations at Nicira and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s chief of staff — this week.

The timing it right for Aviatrix because “the corporate data center is dead,” Mullaney said. What he means is that the cloud is where enterprises will do compute.

But this requires the right network and security architecture, and to that end Aviatrix will provide “the enterprise cloud backbone.” This is an architecture that extends native public cloud networking constructs and infrastructure to provide private, multi-region, and multi-cloud transit networking and security services for enterprise IT. These services create an abstracted layer over the top of public clouds.

“What Nicira did, and what we’re doing here, is building over-the-top networking and security services, but not over the top of the internet or AT&T’s network,” Mullaney said. “We’re building over the top of the new internet for the enterprise, which is the hyperscalers. We’re building over the top of AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, you name it.”

Of course, declaring the death of the data center flies in the face of every other major enterprise infrastructure vendor (VMware, Dell Technologies, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPSE), to name a few) that says the future is hybrid cloud. And Mullaney did admit, “sure, we’re sensationalizing it a little bit.” But he’s not backing down. “What we mean is [the data center] is irrelevant,” he said. “It’s an expense, and it needs to be limited.”

And about said infrastructure vendors, “it doesn’t matter what the old-world guys say,” Mullaney added. “The carnage is coming. Trust me. Mainframes are still around, but they are irrelevant and in this world if you are irrelevant you are dead. The leader from the old are always the last to find out. You’ll see it in the public earnings of a lot of these companies. You can’t hide from it. Go ask Nutanix. The weak ones are dying now and the strong ones will have their time.”