Tigera, Creator of Calico, Recognized as the Winner of 2022 Microsoft OSS on Azure Partner of the Year Award

SAN FRANCISCO, June 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Tigera, which provides the industry's only active Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with full-stack observability for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud, today announced that it has been recognized as a 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year, for open-source software (OSS) on Azure. Tigera was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

"We are very proud to be recognized as Microsoft's Partner of the Year for OSS on Azure as it re-affirms the reach and pervasiveness of Tigera's Calico Open Source solution for container networking and security on Azure and AKS," said Ratan Tipirneni, President and CEO, Tigera. "As enterprises standardize across Microsoft Azure, customers require a resource-efficient and scalable networking and security solution that protects the workloads in a hybrid environment extending from the cloud (Azure and AKS) to traditional on-premises deployments (AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server). Calico is the only technology to support native Windows, eBPF, and Linux containers to match Microsoft's breadth of offerings in AKS, AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server, and self-managed Kubernetes in Azure."

The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered outstanding Microsoft-based applications, services, and devices during the past year. Awards were classified in various categories, with honorees chosen from a set of more than 3,900 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide. Tigera was recognized for providing outstanding solutions and services for open source on Azure.

The Open-Source Applications & Infrastructure category for the Azure Partner of the Year Award recognizes exceptional partners who excel in delivering outstanding open source-based applications or infrastructure solutions on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. As the winner of this category, Tigera has demonstrated innovation, competitive differentiation, customer value and successfully met customer interoperability needs using Calico in combination with the benefits of using Microsoft Azure services.

"I am honored to announce the winners and finalists of the 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards," said Nick Parker, corporate vice president of Global Partner Solutions at Microsoft. "These partners were outstanding among the exceptional pool of nominees and I'm continuously impressed by their innovative use of Microsoft Cloud technologies and the impact for their customers."

Since June 2021, Tigera and Microsoft Azure together provide users with active build, deploy, and runtime security with full-stack observability for securing, monitoring, and troubleshooting containers on Azure and AKS. Tigera works closely with Microsoft to offer networking, security, and observability for containerized workloads running in Microsoft Azure.

Calico Open Source, the default CNI for AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server, is the most adopted networking and security solution for containers and Kubernetes. It provides businesses with:

• Data plane choice: eBPF, standard Linux, and Windows data planes
• Interoperability: Works with non-Kubernetes workloads
• Optimized performance: Built to go faster with lower CPU consumption
• Operation at scale: As your AKS deployments grow, Calico CNI can operate at scale without performance degradation
• Granular access controls: Rich networking and security policy model for secure communication
• Data-in-transit encryption: WireGuard-based encryption
• Full Kubernetes network policy support: Works with the original reference implementation of Kubernetes network policy. While Kubernetes network policy applies only to pods, Calico network policy can be applied to multiple types of endpoints including pods, VMs, and host interfaces.

Calico is a fundamentally open-source solution, and there is no cost for the use of Calico CNI, Calico IPAM or Calico networking and security policies on Azure AKS. For more comprehensive protection, AKS users can easily upgrade to advanced Calico Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) via Azure Marketplace to prevent, detect, troubleshoot, and automatically mitigate exposure risks of security issues in build, deploy, and runtime stages in containers. To learn more, watch an on-demand replay of Tigera's recent office hours with Microsoft. Users can also sign up for a free trial of Calico Cloud on Azure Marketplace.

Additionally, Tigera is a contributor to Azure Arc's "Jumpstart Friends," Microsoft AKS Hackfest, Microsoft's Cloud Native Partner Community, and AKS Office Hour. To learn more about how Tigera and Microsoft work together, visit here.

Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards are announced annually prior to the company's global partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, which will take place on July 19-20 this year. Additional details on the 2022 awards are available on the Microsoft Partner Network blog. The complete list of categories, winners and finalists can be found here.

Tigera provides the industry's only active Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with full-stack observability for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. The company's platform prevents, detects, troubleshoots, and automatically mitigates exposure risks of security issues in build, deploy, and runtime stages. Tigera delivers its platform as a fully managed SaaS (Calico Cloud) or a self-managed service (Calico Enterprise). Its open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution. Tigera's platform specifies security and observability as code to ensure consistent enforcement of security policies, which enables DevOps, platform, and security teams to protect workloads, detect threats, achieve continuous compliance, and troubleshoot service issues in real time. 

Powering more than 100M containers across 2M+ nodes in 166 countries, Calico software is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, and is used by leading companies including AT&T, Discover, Merck, ServiceNow, HanseMerkur, RealPage, L3Harris, and Mindbody.

Contact:
Katherine Benfield for Tigera
Lumina Communications
[email protected]

SOURCE Tigera