CloudGenix has been among the more successful SD-WAN vendors to date, which was reflected in Wednesday's $65 million round of financing.
In addition to existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Intel, new investors, such as ClearSky Ventures, took part in the latest investment round. With its Series C round of funding in the bag, San Jose, Calif.-based CloudGenix has raised a total of $100 million since it was founded in 2013.
"The purpose of the investment is for fueling a global go to market, a global expansion of sales, as well as continuing to aggressively invest in our product," said CloudGenix CEO Kumar Ramachandran in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We're seeing 300% year over year growth and that gives the investors a lot of confidence when a company like us is growing significantly faster than the market. "
While CloudGenix is better positioned than a large chunk of the 50-plus SD-WAN vendors in the market, it does face stiff competition from the likes of Cisco, with its Viptela SD-WAN technologies and VMware, which bought VeloCloud several years ago.
CloudGenix ranked 14th on IHS Markit's fourth-quarter revenue list of SD-WAN companies while VMware and Cisco were ranked first and second, respectively. Despite the size difference between CloudGenix, Cisco, and VMware, Ramachandran said his company is winning customers away from both.
"CloudGenix is one of the startup challengers that is still in attendance," said the principal analyst at Doyle Research in an interview with FierceTelecom. "The other startups were Viptela, Versa and VeloCloud. It seems as though CloudGenix is doing pretty well in the enterprise market."
"CloudGenix has some interesting abilities to customize the platform with their APIs," they added.
To date, Ramachandran said that CloudGenix's customer base was largely comprised of global Fortune 1000 companies, including large banking chains, healthcare, retail and manufacturing verticals, but CloudGenix will use some of its funding to make further inroads with telcos.
Ramachandran said that CloudGenix recently integrated its managed software with AT&T Network Integration Services.
"It's a natural move to expand your channel to managed service providers, and Tier 1 and Tier 2 telcos as well, but they've had most of their success on the enterprise side to date," Doyle said.
Ramachandran said that CloudGenix has additional telco customers that he can't publicly disclose. CloudGenix also has a deal in place with managed service provider Wipro.
"You get three options with CloudGenix," Ramachandran said. "You can consume it and self manage it yourself. You can use it like at AT&T to get a telco managed version, or you can get a carrier neutral version with someone like Wipro that has a global presence to be able to deliver a managed service that a customer can rely on."
RELATED: Juniper Networks gets Mist-y with new cloud SD-WAN service
There has been a raft of SD-WAN vendors announcing partnerships with cloud service providers. Last week, Juniper Networks announced it was using wireless technology from its Mist acquisition to deliver its SD-WAN service into a cloud with Amazon Web Services Direct Connect.
Last year, VMware/VeloCloud and Microsoft Azure announced an SD-WAN partnership, while Versa Networks announced it was partnering with Amazon Web Services to offer SD-WAN to AWS partners. Citrix and Riverbed have also announced availability of their SD-WAN offerings on Microsoft Azure and AWS.
"We're integrated with all the major cloud providers today," Ramachandran said. "We have customers live in production with all the major cloud providers.
"What we're seeing is that in the cloud enterprise space for a lot of customers the debate is between Microsoft Azure and AWS. Then in certain verticals, especially in retail or in grocery chains, we're seeing that Google is starting to emerge as an alternative for the customer."