VeloCloud is a cloud networking services company. Founded in 2012, its headquarters are located in Los Altos, CA, with a development center in Chennai, India. In June of 2014, the company announced the raising of $21 M in funding from top-tier venture capital firms NEA, Venrock, and The Fabric. Following this, the company announced the general availability of its service offering this Summer.
The VeloCloud service was in development for 18 months prior to its release.
Cloud WAN
VeloCloud offers a subscription-based service designed to simplify branch office WANs. “The VeloCloud service works by dynamically steering business-crtical applications over the best paths and links, making multiple, inexpensive broadband links behave like a reliable, high-bandwidth link,” explains Sanjay Uppal, CEO, VeloCloud Inc.
It targets midsize to large enterprises. Specifically, it is aimed at enterprises that have or are planning to add multiple branch offices and must contend with expensive private WAN lines in addition to the sprawl of networking equipment and the high IT overhead for deployment, management, and support at the branch.
Companies across a range of verticals, such as high technology, retail, financial services, and construction, are immediate target users of the cloud-delivered WAN solution.
VeloCloud combines the enterprise-grade Internet with cloud networking and virtualized services to provide a cloud-delivered WAN for the enterprise. This service is designed to end the unacceptable tradeoffs between private lines and public broadband Internet. The service solves the application performance and networking problems faced by branch offices, simplifies brand deployment and ongoing management, and provides IT with greater WAN visibility and cloud-scale analytics.
According to the company, VeloCloud is the first company to provide all three elements needed for a cloud-delivered WAN—cloud networking, virtualized deployment, and operations.
Uppal says the VeloCloud has a strong background in networking, cloud, and virtualization. “They were aware of the challenges of last-mile WAN connectivity and the tradeoffs enterprises struggled with between inexpensive broadband Internet and expensive, but more reliable, private lines,” explains Uppal.
The challenges are exacerbated by the increasing migration of applications to the cloud, the stringent requirements of media-rich applications, and the shrinking IT in the branch. “At the same time, the VeloCloud founders recognized that IT was struggling with getting branches up quickly while maintaining visibility and control over the entire enterprise network. There had to be a better way. It was the quest to address these challenges and resolve the WAN dilemma that led the vision and mission of the company,” adds Uppal.
A New WAN
VeloCloud is a service-based solution that speeds up branch WAN development and solves application performance issues, while offering visualization and analytics of application performance to enterprise IT.
According to Jim Metzler, president, Ashton Metzler & Associates, “what virtualization has done for the data center, VeloCloud is doing for the WAN. VeloCloud is among a new breed of cloud service companies tacking the branch networking marketing, and their game-changing solution promises to comprehensively transform this important market.”
VeloCloud is currently installed in both trial and production deployments in a number of enterprise organizations in North America—including Roka Bioscience, Rockford Construction, and RideNow. VeloCloud plans to expand into Europe and Asia in the next quarter. SW
Aug2014, Software Magazine
