Tata Communications' NetFoundry Becomes First New Independent Subsidiary as Part of 'Shape the Future' Program

Incubators have been around for quite a while, offering growth opportunities to start-ups and innovation. Internal innovation initiatives inside large global enterprises allow founders, often employees of the company, financial support, technical and development support and access to an embedded base of customers. Under one such program of Tata Communications (News - Alert), NetFoundry becomes the first new independent subsidiary as part of their “Shape the Future” program, which has become the talk of the town.

North Carolina-based NetFoundry, a software and business incubated as part of the Tata Communications’ Shape the Future program, for the last few years, has now become an independent subsidiary within the Tata Communications Group. Through this, Tata Communications aims to help NetFoundry to accelerate its growth even further and expand their offerings.

NetFoundry exceeded the $1 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone in under two years of selling its services, increasing by over 50% on a quarter-over-quarter footing for the past three quarters.

“By spinning off NetFoundry, we want to help this innovative, ambitious start-up boost its speed of execution and capture a larger share of a nascent market,” said Tri Pham, Chief Strategy Officer, Tata Communications. “This is an exciting milestone for not just NetFoundry but also for Tata Communications’ Shape the Future, setting a great precedent for scaling other similar breakthrough ventures from this programme.”

The NetFoundry SaaS (News - Alert) start-up project is one of the first ideas developed and funded as part of the program.

“We believe that to innovate successfully; organisations must foster an internal culture that encourages employees to venture out of their comfort zone and dare to try new things without fear of failure. Tata Communications’ Shape the Future is a prime example of that. We also see huge value in bringing together the right ecosystem of partners – from start-up hubs, universities, and the technology ecosystem worldwide – to drive the development of new disruptive ideas. Through this innovation strategy, we strive to add value to everyone: our customers, partners, employees and our industry.”

“We founded NetFoundry on three fundamental beliefs which add up to represent the reinvention of business networking: the application is the new edge; app developers and network engineers need to be able to control secure-by-design networking via APIs and SDKs; and the private enterprise WAN will be replaced by the Internet,” said Galeal Zino, Founder and CEO of NetFoundry.

“Watching that vision unfold over the past two years, with our customers using our APIs and SDKs to innovate in ways we never imagined, and connect their edge and cloud apps without the costs and complexity of private circuits, custom hardware, telcos or legacy WAN constructs (MPLS-WAN, SD-WAN, VPNs), has been fantastic,” Zino continued. “We are now looking forward to continuing to help reinvent networking, globally, and transform business networking from an innovation barrier to an innovation enabler.”

The NetFoundry platform eliminates the need for complicated and expensive networking used in traditional business networking, while stimulating innovation by enabling customers to programmatically embed private networking into their applications and solutions.

The platform allows for application providers, cloud and system integrators, managed service providers and leading-edge businesses to deliver applications across an array of edges and clouds, including zero-trust security and enhanced performance, without being dependant on configuration settings, private circuits or any custom hardware. Customers can control their networks by using the NetFoundry web console, APIs, and SDKs.

Access is gained through NetFoundry’s global Software Defined Networks (SDN) from any Internet connection as NetFoundry manages the fundamental infrastructure in a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model. The software is available on AWS, Azure, CoreSite, Digital Ocean, and IBM (News - Alert) Cloud marketplaces.

“Through Tata Communications’ Shape the Future, NetFoundry has received guidance to help us scale the business along with the freedom to learn and refine our offering as a start-up,” Zino said. “So, we’ve had the best of both worlds: the backing of a leading global digital infrastructure services provider, with the autonomy to innovate independently. We look forward to enabling customer innovation globally, as developers use NetFoundry to spin up networking in the same way that they use IaaS providers to spin up compute.”