LAS VEGAS — Networking didn’t get a lot of love at AWS re:Invent this week — CEO Andy Jassy’s three-hour keynote reportedly didn’t give him enough time to detail all of Amazon Web Services’ networking and security news. So the new AWS Transit Gateway capabilities flew a bit under the radar.

AWS Transit Gateway is a network hub that enables customers to scale and manage connectivity between Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and their on-premises data centers, as well as between thousands of VPCs within an AWS region. AWS added five networking capabilities for AWS Transit Gateway including integration with three SD-WAN vendors — Cisco, Aruba, and Silver Peak — and Aviatrix, a cloud networking startup.

AWS says the integration enables easier and faster connectivity between customers’ branch offices and AWS, and makes it easier to manage and monitor their global network from a single pane of glass.

Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney says using SD-WAN to connect branch offices to the cloud misses the boat.

“Once you go into the cloud, you don’t need SD-WAN,” he said in an interview at re:Invent. “SD-WAN is a good version of the old way of doing MPLS private networks when you’re going back to your data center, and you have your branch offices now. A lot of companies that are still going to do that. So it’s not like today SD-WAN is dead. But mark the calendar: that market is on the decline because more and more the center of gravity goes into the cloud. And once that happens, you just want really good connectivity to your branch offices. And so what AWS has announced allows them to do that.”

Aviatrix calls its new AWS service CloudWAN. It uses native cloud services from AWS including the new AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager, and it extends Aviatrix’s cloud-native orchestration and control to existing Cisco IOS branch office routers. AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager lets customers manage and monitor connectivity between AWS and their on-premises locations from a single console within AWS. CloudWAN directly reconfigures VPN settings and border gateway protocol (BGP) routes to point to AWS and leverage AWS Global Accelerator. This provides the most direct path and low-latency routing to applications running on AWS.

“Our customers need to allow branch office access to AWS workloads in a frictionless way,” said David Brown, VP of Amazon EC2, in a statement. “By integrating the Aviatrix CloudWAN service with our new AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager, we can make routers in branch offices more intelligent when communicating with AWS.”

Mullaney, who is the former CEO at Nicira (which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion and used as the basis for its NSX network virtualization platform) and SVP of networking and security at VMware. He came out of retirement to lead Aviatrix, founded by ex-Cisco network engineer Sherry Wei in 2014.

A year later the startup released its first cloud networking product, which lets customers build their own encrypted networks in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It also allows them to scale and migrate workloads from on-premises sites to these VPCs from a software-defined, centrally managed controller. And last year it launched a hosted service to build and manage VPC networks in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

In June the company announced its 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.

Mullaney loves to say he was “living the dream, loving my life,” before coming out of retirement. “But then the world changed.” By that he means enterprises started shutting down data centers and moving to the cloud. “The herd was now moving,” he said in an earlier interview.

He reiterated all of this in an interview at re:Invent this week. “The center of gravity for infrastructure has now shifted,” Mullaney said. “It’s not on prem.” It shifted to the cloud, he added. “And so now instead of trying to push data center client server architectures into the cloud, it’s the reverse. I’m going to take my cloud architecture. And I’m going to push it everywhere.”

He points to AWS Outposts, the cloud giant’s new on-premises infrastructure that it made available this week, along with AWS’ two new edge initiatives as proof. “I always say the data center is dead, long live the data center,” Mullaney said. “The on-prem data center will still exist, but it will be a node, it will shrink. It’s not going to go away for a lot of companies. But more and more the data center will be built inside of the public clouds.”

And for that companies need public cloud networking (aka Aviatrix’s cloud to branch networking), not SD-WAN, Mullaney says.

“What you need to do is get onto the AWS backbone as fast as you can, and leverage their high-performance, low-latency backbone,” he said. “If the world stayed like data center networking, then SD-WAN is a great option. But as the world starts moving, it’s all about cloud networking. In cloud networking there’s no need for SD-WAN.”

He said he expects Azure and Google to announce similar networking services. And, of course, Aviatrix will be happy to assist.

“If you pay attention you’ll be able to look back on this date, AWS announcing this [branch connectivity service] and say that marked the end of SD-WAN,” Mullaney said. “Somebody’s going to come out now and say that SD-WAN [is] dead. It might not happen for five years. But it’s dead. I mean, it’s over.”