Arista Networks will acquire Awake Security for an undisclosed amount in a deal that gives the networking vendor a network detection and response (NDR) security platform that Awake CEO Rahul Kashyap bragged has stolen customers from Arista’s arch-rival Cisco.

In an April interview with SDxCentral after Awake closed a $36 million Series C funding round, Kashyap said Awake increased its annual recurring revenue by close to 700% over the past year and displaced more established vendors in the market. This includes “several Darktrace customers, several large RSA networking customers, some Cisco Stealthwatch.”

Awake, which launched in 2017, raised about $80 million.

The acquisition promises customers a “stronger and more secure network,” Kashyap wrote in a blog post. “Organizations need to implicitly trust that the underlying network is secure. Integrating Awake Security into the Arista cognitive network fabric allows us to do just that.”

The startup’s security platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate threat detection and hunting. Earlier this year Awake partnered with Google Cloud, which extended its network traffic analysis across all three major cloud providers. It now provides full packet forensics and supports audits, investigations, and compliance with regulations like PCI-DSS across customers’ hybrid-cloud environments.

In a blog about the acquisition, Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal said “we immediately were drawn to the disruptive security and AI-driven model developed by Awake.” She also cited Awake’s AI-driven threat detection for IoT campus networks. Additionally, Arista’s Campus Flow Tracker can work with Big Switch DMF — Big Switch is another recent Arista acquisition — for monitoring and Awake sensors to boost threat detection.

“Looking forward to 2021, I believe networking is at the cusp of an epic transformation in security with proactive detection and response embedded in the network,” Ullal wrote. “This new cognitive AI-driven foundation will transform security and campus networking to deliver uniformity across wired, wireless devices, users, and the internet of things (IoT).”

Ullal also notes how AI-based NDR security complements endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms like CrowdStrike and VMware’s Carbon Black and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms like Splunk to provide visibility into security operations centers (SOCs).

Some vendors, however, are moving beyond EDR and NDR and into extended detection and response (XDR). This combines elements of both, as well as SIEM, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), and network traffic analysis (NTA) in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to centralize security data and incident response. XDR improves threat detection because it correlates threat intelligence across security products and provides visibility across networks, clouds, and endpoints. Gartner called a top security and risk management trend of 2020.