Viptela snags $75M in financing, dedicates funds SD-WAN R&D, customer demands

Viptela, a provider of SDN-WAN technology to large telcos like Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Singtel, has raised $75 million in a Series C round of funding.

Led by Redline Capital with participation from new investor Northgate Capital and existing investor Sequoia Capital, the completion of this round brings Viptela total funding to $110 million.

With the financing complete, Tatiana Evtushenkova, director of Redline Capital has joined Viptela's Board of Directors.

The company will use the funds for a number of functions: scaling sales, marketing, technical support and research and development to meet "aggressive customer demand for its products and execute its global go-to-market strategy."

What makes SD-WAN attractive to multi-site businesses is that they can reduce WAN costs by 50 percent by augmenting costly MPLS private lines with a mix of public broadband connections such as DSL, Ethernet or even wireless LTE services. A multi-site retailer could add more bandwidth on demand and optimize network performance so cloud applications respond as if they were located in the company's own data center.

Verizon's new SD-WAN service, for example, allows customers to "mix and match" private and public IP connections such as MPLS, wireless LTE, broadband and Ethernet. These elements will be based on the enterprise's geographic location, bandwidth and application service availability needs.

But Verizon is hardly alone in its SD-WAN desires.

EarthLink, while not revealing its vendor partners yet, also has plans to formally launch a SD-WAN service later this year with an approach it describes as a one-box solution for its business customers that are transitioning more of their workloads to the cloud.

In addition to Verizon and other carriers like Singtel, Viptela's SD-WAN platform has been adopted by over 25 Fortune 500 enterprises including some of the world's largest retailers, financial institutions, conglomerates, healthcare organizations and other businesses that have many geographically distributed locations.

Viptela's timing to take advantage of the SD-WAN market is certainly ripe. According to IDC estimates, worldwide SD-WAN revenues will exceed $6 billion in 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 90 percent over the 2015-2020 forecast period.

For more:
- see the release

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