After backpacking Sumatra for 28 grueling days, completely cut off from the rest of civilization, I arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia. There was a phone center but it cost over $20 for a single, 10-minute international phone call. This is 1996 – before VoIP (voice over Internet – e.g. Skype phone calls) helped shatter the high pricing set by monopoly telecom providers. For comparison, I was living on much less than $8 per day in Sumatra.
I simply didn’t have the money to even think about walking into the phone center. Fortunately, there was a nearby Internet cafe. It was 1996 – the days of dial-up modems – and pre-Skype. So the cafe was mainly there to sell coffee to people surfing the web. But it was still possible to make VoIP phone calls. That was a lightbulb moment for me. The Internet was going to change everything. It wasn’t just going to connect us with information – it was going to connect us to the people we love. From anywhere, even Jakarta. What else could inexpensive, global connectivity do? Or, what couldn’t it do?
In fact, only a couple of years later, I was in a meeting with Cisco. The same Cisco who helped power those VoIP calls and was now the leading provider of Internet infrastructure. The meeting was led by John Chambers – building 10 – the EBC. I was an engineer at ITXC and we were building the world’s largest wholesale VoIP network, partially on Cisco routers and gateways. To say Chambers and his team were super smart and very gracious with their time would be an understatement, and the experience was almost surreal with Jakarta flashbacks interspersed with the ideas flying around the room.
Time went on. Cisco helped connect the world. ITXC had me hooked on an Internet-based future, and the software we built still powers some of the world’s largest communications providers. Even after ITXC, Cisco played an important role in many of the teams, products and companies I built.
And now we have an opportunity to do even more together. I am thrilled to share the news that Cisco Ventures is now a strategic investor in NetFoundry.
We couldn’t ask for a better partner than Cisco in helping us reinvent networking to meet the needs of the modern world. We have traveled a long way in a short time – from barely audible VoIP calls to a digitally transformed world largely built on Cisco infrastructure. But the next steps are even greater. We are at the point at which networking is becoming the very foundation of the hyperconnected, AI powered world.
There is no glide path. TCP/IP networking is magic but the magic wasn’t designed for the world which didn’t exist at that time. Networking is not as secure-by-design, agile or extensible as it needs to be to serve as the world’s foundation. However, with strong partners like Cisco and SYN Ventures, NetFoundry is enabling innovators to forge the foundation of this increasingly hyperconnected, AI powered world.
NetFoundry already securely connects over one billion sessions per month, but we are just getting started and this new world is just now emerging. People use NetFoundry’s Identity-First Virtual NetworksTM to forge secure-by-design, virtualized network overlays, as software. These overlays ride on top of the magic of TCP/IP networks, adding the elements needed by the emerging world. For example, Identity-First Virtual NetworksTM enable:
- Businesses to forge networks to deliver any workload. These secure-by-design overlays are defined by identities rather than by infrastructure. The virtualized controllers and routers are hosted by NetFoundry, or self-hosted by the business.
- Developers to forge networks into their software. Envision a fleet of robots or set of APIs which communicate only within their overlays, without depending on IP addresses, firewalls, NAT or DNS. Similarly, developers are forging networks into AI agents, MCP servers, AI gateways, browsers, edge servers and reverse proxies.
In both cases, the result is secure-by-design, fully virtualized overlays, spun up or down in minutes, with all access, connections and networking based on identities, posture and events. Implementing different models – from JIT access to continually authenticated access based on multiple factors and posture combinations – becomes a software solution rather than an infrastructure dependent struggle.
What will you do with networking reimagined as identity-first overlays, in a software-only, secure-by-design model? Building applications on top of the Internet – and moving applications like phone calls to the Internet – was the driver of digital transformation. Building applications, networks and security – as a set of cohesive software, held together by identities – will be the driver of the hyperconnected, AI-powered world.
