Here in beautiful and historic Barcelona, we are opening our doors to the public today.
The NetFoundry platform enables apps to make networks, empowering businesses and developers to integrate network independent, programmable networks inside of services and applications. We make it simple for businesses and application providers to deploy software-defined networks across the Internet which have the security and reliability of a private enterprise WAN. Each network can be standalone, or can be bolted on to existing WANs or SD-WANs – for example to extend connectivity to cloud, IoT, and new applications.
NetFoundry’s current customers and partners range from individual application developers to Fortune 50 technology companies. Join us to cut your private network and infrastructure costs and rapidly take your IT, IoT, and cloud apps from prototype to production without sacrificing security or performance.
Hello Software & DevOps Teams, Meet the Network!
We are moving networking to the software world. In minutes, we can deploy a global, secure, performant SDN using off-the-shelf DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Ansible, and Terraform. We are following the lead of IaaS services such as Amazon AWS in this regard. Only a decade ago, most people didn’t understand the value of spinning up virtual machines (VMs) in AWS. Now it is hard to effectively do business without spinning up VMs in a public cloud. A decade from now, it will be hard to effectively do business without spinning up cloud-native SDNs from platforms like NetFoundry.
We are also moving networking to the development world. We are following the lead of companies such as Twilio in this regard. Only five years ago, most people didn’t know anything about Twilio. Now, almost any developer who wants to embed text messaging, voice, or video in her application, will first look at Twilio and Twilio’s competitors. Five years from now, developers will insist on platforms like NetFoundry, which enable the developer to embed secure, performant networking while harnessing the power of being abstracted from the complexities of the network itself.
The APIs and SDKs which power the model described above are already used internally to fulfill our customer’s orders for purpose-built SDNs. In the coming months, the alpha of our development platform which exposes those APIs and SDKs directly to developers and partners will be released.
Our goal is to enable the services to be the drivers, programming networks to be their vehicles and infrastructure. This is the opposite of today’s network-first paradigm in which the needs of the networks (and network operators) are the drivers. Today’s problem is the network is driving blind – the network has only a coarse understanding (at best) of the needs of each service. We’re working with our ecosystem partners are working to put services in the driver’s seat, enabling applications to make their own networks. Traditional networks connect nodes, we connect services.
The World-Class NetFoundry Team
As we emerge from stealth today, I would like to thank our incredible NetFoundry team: Bill Grande; Dave Hart; Jim Clardy; John Landau; Joseph Lombardo; Larry Staton; Manjunath Mahashetti; Michael Hallett; Michael Kochanik; Mike Gorman; Olaf Luetkehoelter; Robert Caamano; Shawn O’Hail. Teams make startups and we are incredibly fortunate to have built a world class team in just a few months of operation.
The NetFoundry team is supported by the talents and resources of a small army, including these critical extended team members, many of whom help us in addition to their “day jobs”: Andre Ortiz; Ankur Jindal; Carin Meier; Clay Campbell; Cynthia Artin, Dan Ho; Daniel Ward; Dipak Biswas; Kari Thorstensen; James Karanassos; Jo Lilore; Joe Smith; Josh Vieira; Julie Woods-Moss; Karl Perkins; Margey Bolen; Michael Levy; Naoko Higashide; Neil O’Donnell; Priyanka Mukherjee; Ravindra Singh; Seth Frankel; Tom Kilcoyne; Tony Arara; Tony Beseau; Tri Pham.
NetFoundry was born in Tata Communications’ Shape the Future innovation program, and Tata Communications has provided exceptional support, leadership and resources. Innovation can happen in leading global companies! The key is a corporate leadership team whom can help instill and support a culture of innovation – Tata Communications has this in spades.
We believe in an ecosystem of best in class partners, working together to provide full-stack business solutions. We have already developed some exceptional partnerships – stay tuned for detailed posts on each of those!
Faster Than Real-Time
20 billion people and devices will be online by 2020, interacting over networks in real-time or faster (AI systems will take actions in anticipation of predicted events). In this hyper-connected world, we don’t believe you should start from a general-purpose network, and then try to force fit each specific business application need into the structures of the network. In a model in which software and services move faster than real-time, the services need to define the network. NetFoundry application-specific networks are defined by you – by the needs of people, businesses, services, applications, and data.
Looking forward to working with you!
– Galeal Zino, Founder
