GigaOM » Aryaka

Aryaka scores $25M to speed up corporate connections

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:40:06 +0000

Aryaka, a startup offering cloud-based wide area network optimization has raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by InterWest Partners, with participation from Presidio Ventures, a Sumitomo Corporation Company and included existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. It brings Aryaka’s total funding to $54 million.

Making wide area networks — the connections between multiple corporate offices or data centers — faster isn’t sexy, but it’s an important element of corporate computing, especially as we move to the cloud and more remote work forces. By taking the traditional WAN optimization game and moving it from boxes located inside corporate offices and data centers into a service comprised of a mesh network of connections, Aryaka has fundamentally changed the business.

Ajit Gupta, founder and CEO of Aryaka, says the money raised will be used for sales and marketing, as the four-year old startup continues to score more customers. The company already counts customers such as Radware and Aruba Networks, and Gupta notes that after the initial trial period that might include two or three locations, many of the customers have surprised him by immediately moving all of their operations onto the network. But it’s competitors are large with companies ranging from Riverbed Networks and Citrix to smaller startups like CloudOpt and Virtela.

Aryaka’s service is comprised of commodity hardware running its WAN optimization software inside carrier-neutral data centers. When a customer signs onto the network, the customer changes the routing setting at its office and sends their traffic to Aryaka’s gear in the data center nearest the office. Once there, the traffic is routed to the closest Aryaka hardware to the destination office.

The design means customers don’t have to buy expensive specialty gear and host it themselves or co-locate it. It also means that as traffic grows Aryaka adds hardware and ports, not the customer — turning yet another element of corporate IT infrastructure into a service. Gupta founded Speedera, a CDN company that had a similar reliance on commodity hardware that resided in carrier-neutral data centers, which then sold it to Akamai. With this much money under his belt it looks like Gupta’s going big with Aryaka.

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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:01:53 +0000

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Akamai Inside: Creating a CDN for Enterprise Apps

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:00:33 +0000

Akamai has created a partnership with Riverbed Networks to improve the delivery of enterprise applications over both public and private networks, giving Akamai a foothold in the enterprise market as cloud computing heats up. It’s also a response to the change in how and where people access their content in an increasingly connected world.

Akamai, a content delivery network that uses a network of thousands of servers located at the edge of ISPs’ networks to speed up the delivery of movies and rich web content over the public Internet, has worked with Riverbed to put Akamai software inside Riverbed’s appliances. Riverbed’s gear sits inside corporate data centers to ensure that enterprise applications are delivered quickly and cheaply over private corporate networks. In short, this partnership gives Akamai a way to bring its software into the enterprise without having to replicate its high-cost model it required to build out its original CDN.

Instead Akamai is using Riverbed’s position in the network to gain a foothold in the cloud. Meanwhile, Riverbed can now tell its clients it can help them deliver content over the public web using Akamai’s CDN. The combination addresses the more complicated networking world emerging as enterprises shift some applications to SaaS providers or public clouds.

This general idea of deploying a CDN-like infrastructure to deliver WAN optimization sounds similar to a product that startup Aryaka is trying to provide by offering its own software inside various data centers and Internet Points of presence. Aryaka – founded by Ajit Gupta, who started Speedera, which he later sold to Akamai — sees a similar need for enterprise customers that want to assure their applications running in the cloud are delivered securely and without expensive, dedicated MPLS lines purchased from carriers. Aryaka, which I saw as a Riverbed -meets-Akamai venture, now has to face an actual Riverbed-meets-Akamai product.

The deal between Akamai and Riverbed isn’t exclusive, but Willie Tejada, VP Application & Site Acceleration at Akamai, said there weren’t a lot of other companies that could provide what Akamai was looking for. The joint solution from both vendors will be out in ~~the second half of the year~~ early 2012, according to the Akamai release.

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