Cisco reached a deal to buy Kubernetes-focused startup Banzai Cloud, which marks its second cloud-native-focused acquisition in two months.

Headquartered in Budapest, 3-year-old Banzai Cloud developed a Kubernetes-based platform that helps enterprises develop, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications. It raised $2.5 million in one founding round in 2018.

Cisco plans to acquire the startup’s assets and team, and it expects the acquisition to close by the end of Cisco’s second quarter fiscal 2021. The companies did not disclose financial details.

When the deal closes, the Banzai Cloud team will join the Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, and they will focus on incubating new projects for cloud-native networking, security, and edge computing environments for distributed applications.

In a blog post about the acquisition, Cisco SVP of Emerging Technologies and Incubation Liz Centoni said Banzai Cloud’s technology will further Cisco’s cloud-native push and complement its Portshift acquisition, which closed last month. “This [Banzai Cloud] has demonstrated experience with complete end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime, and security workflows,” she wrote. “They have built and deployed software tools that solve critical real-world pain points and are active participants in the open-source community as sponsors, contributors, and maintainers of several open-source projects.”

Portshift developed a Kubernetes-based platform to secure containers and serverless applications.

“These two cross-border acquisitions are a testament to the globalization of the cloud-native ecosystem and underscore our commitment to hybrid, multi-cloud application-first infrastructure as the de facto mode of operating IT,” Centoni wrote.

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, said buying Banzai Cloud is a good move for Cisco, and he honed in on the security aspect. “The rise of containers will enable companies to put more workloads in more places and that creates some big time security risks at the container layer that could be invisible to the network,” he said. “Cisco has excelled at security on the network, but sometimes that’s blind to other types of threats. A good analogy is that you can close all the lanes on a highway, but that doesn’t do much good if people are dropping bombs from drones above. This acquisitions protects containers from container specific threats the network might not see.”

The acquisition also follows Cisco’s Q1 fiscal 2021 earnings call last week, during which Cisco reported a 9% revenue decline. But that first-quarter drop wasn’t as steep as investors had expected, and that beat, coupled with a relatively sunny Q2 outlook, sent Cisco shares up 9% after the call with investors.

Also on the call, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins repeated Cisco’s six strategic focus areas around cloud-native, and developing new and better application insights, visibility, security, and networking top that list. “The pandemic’s going to accelerate the need and our opportunity to go deliver on those technologies,” Robbins said at the company’s annual partner summit last month.