SDN pioneer Big Switch Networks announced that it has closed a Series C round and raised $48.5 million in total growth financing. The funds will be used to spur adoption with both enterprise and carrier customers.
Big Switch says it continues to drive adoption, including more than 300 percent growth in 2015 with customer wins across the U.S., APAC and EMEA regions and in verticals including tech, financial services, government, service providers and higher education.
The company has two products and three use cases, which have played a critical part in its growth, including accelerated adoption with enterprise and carrier customers of both Big Monitoring Fabric, a next-generation network monitoring fabric, as well as Big Cloud Fabric, a data center fabric built using whitebox or britebox switches and SDN controller technology.
Big Switch also named former NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven, as well as venture capitalist Gary Morgenthaler, to its board of directors.
"I am pleased that our performance continues to earn the trust of our customers, partners, and investors, all of whom believe in our mission to disrupt the status quo of networking," said Big Switch CEO Douglas Murray in a press release. "Dan Warmenhoven's knowledge and operational experience scaling NetApp from hyper-growth startup through maturity will be invaluable as Big Switch continues to scale and as we introduce our core products to new customers in more markets around the world. I am also thrilled to have Gary Morgenthaler join the board to share his invaluable experience as one of Silicon Valley's pre-eminent investors."
The financing includes participation from both new and existing investors, including Morgenthaler Ventures, Silver Lake Waterman, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Accton, CID Group, MSD Capital and others. Since its founding in 2010, Big Switch has secured $94 million in total funding.
The company isn't naming names, but it is working with five of the top 10 carriers by revenue, a spokesperson told FierceWirelessTech.
Earlier this month, John Donovan, senior executive vice president of Technology and Operations at AT&T (NYSE: T), said the operator is on track to go from having 5 percent of its software built on open source to having 50 percent of it built on open source. AT&T also is heavily involved in almost all the major open source efforts, including Open DayLight, Open NFV, ONOS and OpenStack.
Millions of wireless users already are running on a virtualized network and its initial SDN product, called Network On Demand that was introduced in early 2014, is now used by more than 275 AT&T business customers around the world.
For more:
- see this release
- see this ZD Net article
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