Cloud Distribution planning to disrupt ADC market with new vendor

Avi Networks positioning itself to compete with F5 Networks and Citrix in market space

Cloud Distribution is aiming to disrupt the application deliver controller (ADC) market with new vendor signing Avi Networks.

The VAD claims that legacy ADC vendors have failed to keep up with the evolution of the cloud market, and argues that Avi's software offers easier management, faster performance, greater elasticity, deeper analytics, and more powerful automation than its competitors.

"The legacy approach of traditional ADC technologies is all about hardware and that used to be a big thing because people needed significant performance and it was deemed that that was the only way that you could get it," Bruce Hockin, partner development director at Cloud Distribution, told CRN.

"But the market has moved on. It is not about having a dedicated appliance anymore, it's about having technology that is pervasive and can support the application regardless of the geography or location of where that application is, whether it be on-premise, sitting in a physical or virtual environment or on cloud - it doesn't matter. Traditional solutions cannot do that."

Santa Clara-based Avi earlier this month bagged $60m in a funding round from Cisco Investments and other investors, taking its total funding to $115m. It claims its technology has already been adopted by 20 per cent of Fortune 450 firms.

Hockin said that end users were responsible for the drive to a cloud-first environment, and that in order to create value for those users, the VAD has to "adapt" to the way customers are deploying their applications.

"What attracted us to Avi is that they are the only vendor out there that can cater to every application environment; there isn't anything they can't do. It makes them more relevant to more customers.

"The others are limited in terms of their applicability because they have a legacy architecture and they can't do some of the things that Avi can do, and therefore the addressable market space isn't as big for them."

Hockin stated that the market is moving towards a more flexible software-defined approach and that the channel needs to adapt to this.

"What we're starting to see is the decoupling of software and hardware. The two were intrinsically linked.

"That decoupling is now gaining a lot of pace because the strength of the hardware out there now and existing infrastructures means that people can start to layer these solutions as applications on top of them and know that they can get the performance and flexibility out of them and that never used to be the case.

"We're seeing more software-defined and cloud-centric architectures - that's the way that the market is moving, which is why Avi can deploy on anything, because it has to."