Lavelle aims to be India’s number one SD-WAN vendor —Rajdip Gupta

Angel investor IdeaSprings-backed Lavelle Networks Inc. – incorporated in US and India – is a young startup with expertise in developing Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD-WAN) platform for enterprise networks. The company, in early 2018, brought in a new cofounder, Vishal Khare, from Citrix, as part of its growth and expansion plans. Voice&Data e-connected with Vishal Khare to know how Lavelle under his operations is steering towards sustained success. Few excerpts of the interaction:

Voice&Data: Lavelle Networks promises to deliver faster and cheaper enterprise communication. How has this been possible for the company over the years?

Vishal: WAN is about connecting people and applications, and the most fundamental construct of connectivity is bandwidth. But networking folks never envisioned a world where alwaysavailable bandwidth would be a utility with adequate security and reliability. Networks will be built from commodity hardware and controlled from the cloud. That’s why, we offer our SD-WAN Network Orchestrator- CloudStation, as a cloud service from day zero. Running the controller from the cloud means being able to do massive amounts of real-time analysis for every enterprise, which will bring true agility to enterprise networking.

We are building solutions that accelerate networks for the digital economy. And at a lower total cost of ownership by introducing new business models that provide true value to our customers. Depending on the requirements of our enterprise buyer we offer CloudStation editions in a true network SaaS business model.

The customer is being ‘relieved’ of doing mundane networking chores, and all of that is automated using intelligence and software in the cloud, and all of this delivered over extremely low cost hardware.

Voice&Data: How is Lavelle creating an edge on Hybrid WAN and how is this technology helpful for the telecom market?

Vishal: SD-WAN can bring maximum value to enterprises by handling any kind of hybrid WAN scenario, whether MPLS, Internet, leased line, 3G/4G, private WAN address, public WAN address, ephemeral WAN address using DHCP, and a host of other variants. At Lavelle Networks we are creating an edge on Hybrid WAN by focusing on network scale (one of our initial customer’s was a network with more than 1,000 sites), and 100 percent hybrid WAN support. Enabling all possible combinations of hybrid transport is complex, but we want to make sure all the use cases of hybrid transport are covered. The other area we distinguish ourselves is in our extensive work in the public cloud since we began our company.

Typically providing safe, private networking to enterprises was possible only by a few large telecom operators, but SD-WAN allows all regional and mid-sized operators to harness regular broadband to provide safe and private connectivity to enterprises. For larger operators, SD-WAN enables unprecedented levels of network automation due to its modern controller architecture, REST APIs, SDN architecture, helping them reduce TCO of enterprise connectivity services.

Voice&Data: What provoked Lavelle to invent ScaleAOn Private Networks?

Vishal: Email is so simple now with GoogleApps or O365, storage is made simple with Dropbox, why are we behind in the networking world in creating simple user interfaces? This is what provoked us to invent ScaleAOn – Private Networks, a modern intent-driven approach to WAN, rather than the classical protocol driven approach prone to complexity.

Voice&Data: In your opinion, how are Indian enterprises imbibing advanced SDN-WAN solutions and how is Lavelle placing its solutions in the Indian market?

Vishal: SD-WAN is a phenomenon which will continue to gain a lot of market support because it is challenging the

traditional ways of doing Enterprise Networks and also the traditional vendors involved in providing solutions around the same. India is looking to remain in the forefront of this phenomenon because of the value that SD-WAN brings in the form of flexibility, cost, and scale.

We at Lavelle Networks, believe in building simple yet best-in-class solutions to complex networking problems at optimal TCO/ROI. Lavelle Networks today has the largest install base in India with some of the marquee customer names. While executing such projects, we have been able to prove our credentials around technology, scale, and support capabilities. We have already ventured in overseas markets but India will continue to remain as a focused market. We aim to be the number one SD-WAN vendor in India, and we are confident of it because our solution can handle difficult network challenges as well complexities that are unique to India enterprise networks. Voice& Data: Can you comment on Lavelle’s partners and resellers? Vishal: We believe in leverage and working through partners. Over the last 12 months or so, we have been able to build a robust set of partners which includes Global OEMs, Global SIs, and few strategic tier 2 partners. We believe in making our partner business healthy and hence will not go a for a big expansion on our partner base. We will continue to channelize maximum business with partners who are strategic, capable and have a long-term view with us.

A few weeks back, we had launched our Global Partner Program and under which we included details of our Partner Program Process and Benefits. We are seeing a very good response to the same. We now have 25+ committed partners globally and are looking to grow these to optimal numbers in the next 6-9 months to support our global operations.

Voice&Data: How is Lavelle critical to plans like Make in India and Digital India?

Vishal: Lavelle Networks products are conceptualized and Made in India for Indian and Global consumption. We understand the Indian Network Conditions the best, and fit into parameters of ‘Make in India’. We have already been engaging with many Govt and PSU customers. As a company, we believe in making technology components which ‘Accelerate networks for the Digital Economy’. Our products enable effective delivery of Digital Initiatives of Indian and Global Enterprises.

Voice&Data: What are Lavelle’s plans in terms of human capital and financial capital requirements?

Vishal: We are looking to grow our team by 5x in the next couple of years, which will span R&D, Marketing, Sales and international teams. As a growing enterprise SaaS company, we always look to engage with the right kind of investors who understand our space and know what it takes to build success, to fuel our business expansion, and our innovation labs.

Voice&Data: Could you outline Lavelle’s roadmap for the next 5 years?

Vishal: We are very clear in our vision from the beginning, that we want to be a complete networking platform for the digital enterprise. Our longer-term focus for the next 3-5 years is to fold in all the key access functions – switching, WiFi, content inspection into one seamless platform controlled from the cloud.

We will be transforming our policy engine from an application- based approach to a 360-degree user, device, application and transaction approach to providing the finest granularity of network control. The future of branch networking includes the single user, work anywhere from a handheld device, you will see us extend our enterprise network functions right down to that platform in the next 5 years.

SD-WAN is a phenomenon which will continue to gain a lot of market support because it is challenging the traditional ways of doing Enterprise Networks