To deal with SD-WAN issues, organizations must have a solid team to wholly understand the network devices, connectivity, topology, and several other factors. It is essential to have a good network management architecture to examine the events from network devices. To deal with this critical issue of WAN for distributed enterprises, Lavelle Networks developed solutions by connecting various aspects using the world’s most straightforward SD-WAN control panel, fastest network convergence algorithms, and a true network-as-a-service experience.
Lavelle Networks was founded in 2015 by the fantastic fourfold of Shyamal Kumar, Karthik Madhava, Drritiman Borah, and Randhir Bhattacharya, who felt the urge to create a new, dynamic and agile software platform for business networks. In 2018, they were joined by Vishal Khare to expand their enterprise go-to-market initiatives.
As the CEO, Shyamal has led several data center, enterprise, and service provider networks. He is passionate about embracing SDN and cloud technologies to bring simplicity and performance to data networks. He plans to enable every customer to take their business to every location and ensure that their networks are always accelerated, secured, and simplified.
Let us unveil the journey of Lavelle Networks, which started over a cup of coffee.
The Overview
Lavelle’s vision is to deliver the best enterprise network experience for every user, on every device, for every application, on any cloud. It focuses on distributed enterprises that are increasingly moving their applications to the cloud, enabling them to consume network-as-a-service using its revolutionary SD-WAN platform. With the finest Indian enterprises as its customers and has built the largest SD-WAN networks in India from 2017 – 2021, Lavelle is a result of its customers’ trust.
Having won 100+ customers, which is 1/3rd of the early adopters of Lavelle’s technology in the last three years, it is now building to acquire its first 1000 customers worldwide.
Leading with Passion
Shyamal Kumar is a data networks product leader and has led several platforms spanning data center, enterprise, and service provider networks. He is passionate about embracing SDN and cloud technologies to bring simplicity and performance to data networks. Having started his career with the venerable FreeBSD TCP/IP stack to the current SDN/NFV platforms, he has been instrumental in breakthrough product lines like the Juniper MX. He also brought the initial generation of wireless broadband platforms worldwide through the Telsima WiMAX portfolio.
In 2001, he was a key member of Inkra Networks, building the industry’s first virtual services switch, with zero downtime over years of network upgrades due to its pioneering dynamically linked modular system architecture.
As Founder & CEO of Lavelle Networks, his team has brought SD-WAN products to market in his current endeavor. The ScaleAOnTM software platform is hardware agnostic, multi-cloud, and uses intent-driven policies.
Lavelle Networks is also the world’s first network appliance platform, driven only using cloud-native REST APIs and all software orchestrated using Linux containers. This enables their worldwide channel network to use compatible white label hardware and build high-performance enterprise networks at the lowest TCO and fastest ROI. Shyamal and his team believe that today’s cloud-first, digital-driven – enterprises can take their business anywhere, as long as the network is available.
Best-in-Class Solutions
Shyamal states that a distributed enterprise is a nightmare for IT teams to maintain network SLAs, performance, and increasing demands for connectivity to multiple applications and cloud services. Businesses drive IT requirements rather than IT prescribe recommended solutions in the 21st century.
From India’s largest e-commerce company to the largest private bank – every customer was frustrated with slow network links, complex telecom contracts, legacy routers, and complicated configurations to connect to cloud applications. Lavelle built a modern cloud-native, a web-service-based network-as-a-service platform that runs on commodity hardware and provides excellent network visibility, encryption, security, and software-defined policy control to improve the user experience every day vastly.
Lavelle’s solution is so robust and scalable that it offers complete hardware on a subscription basis as part of its SaaS. It is probably the industry’s first network SaaS solution. Most industry peers are still hardware providers and have hardware-centric pricing, and it has 3X – 5X more SaaS revenue due to its 100% software architecture and cloud service.
A Preferred Choice
Software that scales to tens of thousands of enterprise locations, connecting businesses across all of India’s states and union territories, and excellent customer service for the entire lifecycle of the solution makes Lavelle stand out in the eyes of its customers.
Shyamal expresses that building networks are tough for a young company to win more than a hundred enterprise customers. Soon, it is testimony to the quality and depth of its enterprise software architecture and deep technical expertise in the team.
Awards & Accomplishments
- Gartner Quadrant for the Asia Pacific in consecutive years from 2019
- CIO Choice Award from 2018
- NASSCOM Emerge 50, Microsoft Accelerator Top 14, Your Story Tech 30, Jio GenNext
- Voted among Top 25 CEOs in Enterprise SaaS companies – APAC
- 10,000+ locations connected
- Network of more than 2500 ISPs covering Tier-I, Tier-II, Tier-III & Tier-IV cities
Lessons from Unprecedented Times
Shyamal conveys that COVID-19 was an extremely demanding time for the business, with India going through excruciating periods of low business productivity due to nationwide lockdowns to curb the pandemic. Lavelle lost near and dear ones within its team and families of its team members during the consequent waves of the virus. The biggest lesson for us is that the human spirit is far more resilient than we ever credit it.
As a team and as a company, Lavelle rallied around its customers and focused on sticking to the core fundamentals of a good business – customer focus, exceptional service quality, financial prudence, to navigate this exceptional business environment. With the company’s banking, financial, and e-commerce customers being essential services and allowed to operate aggressively to support the citizens across the nation, Lavelle grew rapidly despite the nationwide lockdowns.
The company rolled out Asia’s largest SD-WAN network during this period, a 3000 branch network for one of the largest public sector banks. That means its product works very well, and customers see great value when connectivity is the topic of the day at every network.
What Lies Ahead?
Shyamal says, “We are on our way to winning 1000+ customers worldwide and building alliances with telecom providers who are increasingly migrating their legacy offerings to SD-WAN solutions. The key milestone for us is to acquire customers every week and month to cement our position in the vast Indian market for new technologies.”