My impressions after 1 month at Avi Networks
I am a dyed-in-the-wool startup guy. I enjoy the journey of taking on innovative technologies that address clear customer pain points, growing the opportunity at a fast pace, and disrupting a legacy market that hasn’t seen much change in a long time. I did this at Nutanix, Infoblox, and many other companies before that. But picking the right startup company is not just a question of luck, it requires a few ingredients that can make the difference between success and failure.
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Bringing technology innovation to a market space that has been in status quo for the last 5 years
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Having the right team in place
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Excitement and adoption in the channel
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Backed by the top VCs
Avi Networks had all these criteria in place.
The speed of IT and the brick wall
We are at the threshold of significant change in enterprise computing. In my conversations, there is a well-recognized sense of urgency in many businesses about applications and the supporting services required to roll them out continuously. IT and development teams at application-centric organizations are collaborating on processes, frameworks, and tools to speed up operations. DevOps, orchestration, microservices, analytics, service-chaining, micro-segmentation, automation, and containers are all part of the vocabulary for the new IT.
But that sense of excitement for faster, simpler operations runs into a brick wall when it comes to services such as load balancing (and other L4-L7 services) which have been delivered on legacy architectures and hardware appliances. These legacy solutions are built for traditional monolithic environments and in the new IT context, they have become point solutions that cannot cope with business needs.
Why I am so excited about Avi Networks
The software defined application delivery and services that Avi has built is being embraced by large enterprise customers who are deploying applications at scale. It is happening as we speak ... I have never been able to create so much traction in such a short timeframe – not even at Nutanix which is leading a groundswell of change in the storage and compute space and driving Web Scale initiatives within datacenters.
I have been deeply impressed by the down-to-earth, can-do culture in the team, from one of the best (and fast growing) engineering teams in the valley all the way to the executive leadership team and the board.
Before joining, I did my due diligence within the channel landscape and domain experts - all agreed that Avi is solving significant challenges that are left unaddressed by traditional ADCs. One of our top partners, Jason Dance, Managing Director for BigTec UK, Exclusive Networks Group said, “Great product, right market, right timing. This solution is generating great interest in the F500 in the UK.”
Avi Networks is backed by top league VCs: Lightspeed, Greylock, and Menlo. They have an impressive track record.
I just wanted to make sure to be a part of this!
If you want to see Avi Networks in action, join us for our weekly “demonar” on Tuesdays at 11:00 am PST.
