New Versa CEO Kelly Ahuja talks about the pace of change in business and technology, and how every company needs to move with speed and scale to win. The world of cloud, mobility and applications has gotten us on a path to the Internet of Everything. The need for speed is driving every business to rethink their infrastructure and network. The benefits of Cloud have made it compelling for businesses to adopt a ‘shrinking data center’ approach. This, combined with the increased adoption of cloud-based applications by lines of business, requires a change in architecture of the wide-area network and security.
Over the last few months I reflected on my experience in telecommunications, I studied the business and technology shifts, and their impact on how the wide-area network (WAN) of the future will be designed, deployed and operated. Every WAN transition from private lines to Frame Relay to ATM and finally MPLS was driven by the business need to achieve simplicity while scaling cost effectively.
Every business I visited talked about appliance sprawl in the branch, rigidness of architecture and the implications on cost and complexity – causing the WAN to become a business bottleneck. I concluded that the future requires the infusion of WAN with security, built with the cloud principles of openness, elasticity and multi-tenancy. After validating the idea with several industry experts and customers, I considered starting a company in this space. In the process, I was introduced to Versa Networks who, to my surprise, was already well down this journey…so I decided to join them.
Versa Networks is the perfect confluence of an excellent Team coming together and innovating at the intersection of the right Technologies and at the perfect Time. We are an IP services company helping service providers and enterprises transform how they build, deploy and operate their wide-area networks and services. We are transforming the networking business with our SD-WAN for enterprises and SD-Security solutions.
A Gartner analyst said in a recent blog: “We are on the brink of one of the most dramatic changes in WAN services that we have seen in decades. Actually, the last major change took place in the late nineties [when MPLS-based WAN services started cannibalizing Frame Relay.”
I have not witnessed this level of excitement in the WAN market since the MPLS and Internet days. If these past experiences are any indication, we are in for a long and wild ride to rebuild wide-area networks, bringing them to the software and cloud age.
Come along and let’s transform networks together.