Big Switch Networks, a startup just emerging from stealth mode, is said to be building a new platform that will bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks. To help see that vision through, the company recently announced it has secured $13.75 million in a Series A financing round led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

Big Switch Networks was co-founded last year by CEO Guido Appenzeller and Vice President of Sales and Marketing Kyle Forster. Along with the new funding, the company added a list of heavy hitters to its board of directors, including Mark Leslie, former CEO of Veritas; Bill Meehan, leader of McKinsey and Co.'s West Coast and private equity practices and director emeritus; Shirish Sathaye, partner at Khosla Ventures and former vice president of engineering and CTO of Fore Systems and Alteon WebSystems; and Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures and former senior vice president/general manager of the Routing Technology Group at Cisco.

Big Switch Networks' perspective states that advances over the last few years in compute virtualization have left enterprise networking behind, and that it was now time for networking to have its very own VMware. While many believe networking has become boring and commoditized, Big Switch Networks wants to make enterprise networking exciting again. And to help them achieve that goal, the company is relying on the newfound ability to program enterprise networking gear with the OpenFlow communications protocol, a project that Appenzeller was involved in developing while at Stanford University.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.