The 10 Coolest Networking Startups Of 2013

SDN Startups Take Center Stage

Software-defined networking (SDN) was the talk of the networking industry in 2013. And as the conversation continued, and more and more SDN technologies started to take shape, SDN-focused startups no question stole the spotlight this year.

That said, other networking trends, like hosted collaboration and mobility, helped plenty of other, non-SDN-focused startups capture the attention of analysts, partners and the industry at large.

Here are 10 networking startups that especially stood out in 2013.

Sideband Networks

CEO: Zane Taylor

Fresh out of stealth mode in November, Sideband Networks is already earning recognition for its unique network performance monitoring and analytics solutions.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup provides what it dubbed the industry's first unified solution that can correlate live and logged network traffic, allowing administrators to compare predicted and historical network traffic models with real-time traffic flows. This, according to Sideband, allows administrators and their teams to catch and diagnose network issues before they even happen.

Sideband's technology -- available as either a virtual or hardware appliance -- also offers a single point of management for both virtual and physical networks, network analytics capabilities for live traffic up to 40 Gbps, and real-time alerts for network issues.

Insieme Networks

CEO: John Chambers

2013 was a big year for start-up and Cisco spin-in Insieme Networks, which launched its flagship application-centric infrastructure (ACI) in December.

ACI -- which is basically Insieme and Cisco's answer to the much ballyhooed software-defined networking (SDN) trend -- is touted by both companies as being the next evolution beyond network overlays, a common type of SDN deployment that involves running a separate, software-based layer on top of existing network infrastructures.

ACI is supported by hardware components including merchant silicon and custom ASICs from Insieme, along with Cisco's new Nexus 9000 line.

ACI and Insieme, now a wholly owned Cisco subsidiary, will anchor Cisco's broader SDN strategy moving forward, as the networking giant looks to take on rivals including VMware and Hewlett-Packard in the increasingly crowded SDN market.

Big Switch Networks

CEO: Douglas Murray

SDN startup Big Switch Networks, which made its commercial sales debut in 2012, kept itself busy this year.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company in March came to market with Switch Light, an open-source thin switching platform aimed at accelerating the adoption of OpenFlow and SDN. The platform, according to Big Switch, frees customers from what it called the largely proprietary or vendor-specific networking infrastructures of today.

And that wasn't Big Switch's only stand against vendor-specific gear this year. The company forfeited its leadership role in the open source SDN consortium OpenDaylight, after word spread that Cisco code was being used as the basis for OpenDaylight's SDN controller.

"While forward-thinking customers are committed to this [open source] trend, we question whether or not the incumbent hardware vendors leading OpenDaylight have a similar commitment," wrote Big Switch CTO Guido Appenzeller in a blog post.

vArmour Networks

CEO: Roger Lian

Founded in 2011 by veterans of the former NetScreen, Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup vArmour Networks is taking the software-based craze that's sweeping the networking industry and applying it to the realm of security.

Specifically, vArmour is cooking up what it calls software-defined security (SDSec), a set of solutions -- for which details are still light -- that are meant to deliver virtualization concepts, like greater flexibility, to network security systems. According to vArmour, SDSec will also eliminate the bottlenecks that have prevented data centers from fully realizing the benefits of compute and network virtualization.

vArmour in January raised $6 million in a Series A round of financing led by Highland Capital Partners, bringing the company's told funding to date to $8 million.

Embrane

CEO: Dante Malagrino

Embrane, founded in 2009, is one of many SDN-focused startups to sprout up over the past few years. But the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has managed to stand out by taking the core concepts of SDN and applying them beyond the Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking functions being targeted by the bulk of its rivals.

Embrane achieves this through Heleos, its distributed software platform that moves the programmable networking attributes promoted by most SDN vendors into Layers 4-7 of the network, offering functions such as load balancing and VPN.

In 2013, Embrane announced the latest version of its flagship platform -- Heleos 2.2 -- and also signed on system integration giant World Wide Technology, the first of what it said will be many steps it plans to take to foster its North American channel.

HeyWire

CEO: Meredith Flynn-Ripley

Holding firmly to the belief that the bulk of business messaging tools on the market today are straight out of the 1990s, HeyWire this year unveiled an enterprise-focused version of its flagship mobile messaging service.

The cloud-based service lets users text-enable their business landlines, eliminating the need for them to give out their personal phone number for any colleagues or clients who prefer to text, rather than call. The service works by entering the users' business line into the HeyWire cloud, and then redirecting all text messages sent to that business landline to a smartphone, tablet or PC. The user can then use any of those three devices to respond to the sender.

HeyWire in December also unveiled its first formal partner program, which lets solution providers whitelabel and embed their own corporate brand into the HeyWire service.

Jeda Networks

CEO: Stuart Berman

Storage networking startup Jeda Networks came out of stealth mode in February, touting a new overlay technology for software-defined networks, called the Fabric Network Controller, that it said can deliver networked storage to converged infrastructures without the need for Ethernet switches.

According to Newport Beach, Calif.-based Jeda Networks, the company takes a pure software approach to storage networking, abstracting storage network's primary services from underlying hardware to reduce the cost and complexity of storage in cloud or virtualized environments. As Jeda Networks CEO and founder Stuart Berman put it, Jeda can "virtualize the ways servers communicate with storage."

Pica8

CEO: James Liao

San Jose-based Pica8 was spun out from sever vendor Quanta roughly a year-and-a-half ago, offering a virtualized network switch built with merchant silicon. Today, Pica8's claim to fame is its "open SDN reference architecture," or an approach to software-defined networking that basically provides a blueprint for cloud providers to combine switches with an OS and an OpenFlow controller.

The startup in December launched the Pica8 SDN Starter Kit, an "out-of-the-box" kit that includes an open-source network controller, a programmable network tap, an open-source network intrusion detection system, and other components meant to give customers a complete SDN solution "that doesn't take months to implement."

Affirmed Networks

CEO: Hassan Ahmed

With more mobile devices and Internet traffic traversing their networks than ever before, mobile operators today face a unique set of challenges. That's where Acton, Mass.-based Affirmed Networks wants to help.

Founded in 2010, Affirmed Networks produces a range of technologies aimed at helping mobile operators better handle the influx of traffic and devices tapping into their networks. Among these technologies is the Affirmed Open Workflow, a service orchestration solution built into all of Affirmed's offerings that enables the integration of multiple subscriber network services into a single solution.

Affirmed's technology isn't going unnoticed; in June, the company secured $51 million in Services C funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by KCK Group.

Tely Labs (And Blue Jeans Network)

CEO: Sreekanth Ravi

Since its founding in 2010, Tely Labs has gained attention in the consumer and SMB market for its videoconferencing and collaboration systems.

But, this year, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup turned its attention to the enterprise with the launch of telyHD Pro, a business-focused collaboration platform that will sell exclusively through the channel. What makes telyHD Pro unique, according to Tely Labs, is that it has built-in SIP support, so it can integrate with other standards-based systems including Polycom or Cisco.

Also this year, Tely Labs introduced a partnership with fellow videoconferencing and collaboration startup Blue Jeans Network, through which buyers of telyHD Pro can receive 60 days of Blue Jeans' cloud-based videoconferencing service free of charge.