John Chambers and Cisco veterans launch HPE-backed vendor

Chambers positions new vendor as edge-compute competitor to AWS

Former Cisco boss John Chambers and a group of former Cisco execs have brought their new vendor out of stealth, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise among the early investors.

Pensando is "pioneering the new edge services model of enterprise and cloud computing", the group said, with its distributed software-defined platform.

It claims the platform can transition legacy architectures to the cloud without costly investment and disruption.

The vendor has been unveiled following a Series C round led by HPE and Lightspeed Venture Partners, which will raise up to $145m - taking total investment to $278m.

Chambers (pictured) said: "The team behind Pensando has worked together for more than twenty-five years and has an unmatched track record of disruptive innovation.

"We are enabling a broad range of ecosystem partners and customers including cloud, enterprises, [service providers] and technology companies to deploy cloud architectures that give them the ability to compete in the next big market transition as the world goes multi-cloud.

"Put together, it's no wonder that Pensando is coming out of the gate with a marquis list of investors, partners, and customers. This team is an execution machine that has never missed."

Pensando has been founded by Cisco's so-called "MPLS team", which spent years with the vendor - Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond.

The team have sold four start-ups to Cisco in the past and left the vendor in 2016.

In an interview with Reuters, Pond said it wasn't clear if Cisco would be interested in acquiring the new vendor, but said that the long-term aim at the moment is an IPO.

John Chambers was joined by HPE CEO Antonio Neri for the launch, with Neri posting an image of the pair on LinkedIn.

Neri also commented in the Pensando press release, stating: "The future belongs to those who are first to harness the power of data.

"The combination of HPE software defined compute, storage, networking, security services with Pensando technology will equip HPE's customers with ways to act fast on a continuous stream of data that grows richer every day."

Founded in 2017, Pensando has positioned itself as a competitor to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Nitro System, claiming it outperforms the cloud giant's offering by 5.9 per cent - but did not clarify the metrics it is using to make the comparison.

Prem Jain, CEO of Pensando, said: "Advances in emerging technologies such as 5G, IoT, and AI, are accelerating data growth and changing not just how we consume data but where we consume it. Computing is migrating to where the data is.

"New deployment models driven by this shift are no longer just about moving workloads to the cloud but moving scalable services closer to data, regardless of where it resides.

"This tectonic change is breaking existing infrastructure and requires an entirely new, future-proof architecture designed for the next generation of the cloud. Pensando is the answer: we are democratising the cloud with the first software-defined, edge-accelerated, always secure and visible platform that will run in any environment."