Viptela Inc., the Software-Defined
WAN company, today announced that it has been named the top pre-IPO
company in the Clouded Leopards Den 2015 competition, which recognizes
startups with market changing technologies. Finalists were selected by a
panel venture capitalists, technology innovators and industry
luminaries, including event chairman Dr.
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and Professor of Innovation at
The University of Texas.
Viptela was also recently named one of the Next Billion Dollar Startups
by Forbes and a Gartner Cool
Vendor in enterprise networking.
Dr. Metcalfe of the University of Texas at Austin said, “The winners of
the 2015 Clouded Leopards Den competition are inventing the future. We
salute all the nominees and finalists for their vision and creativity,
and look forward to seeing all of these companies move on to future
greatness.”
The Viptela Secure Extensible Network (SEN) product enables large
enterprises to centrally manage and secure multiple networks and
transport technologies as if they were a single system. Since
introducing SEN in 2014, healthcare, retail and financial organizations
have deployed Viptela to address the cost, complexity and flexibility
shortcomings of legacy wide area network (WAN) infrastructures. In
addition, several Tier-1 carriers have selected SEN to provide SD-WAN
managed services to their business customers.
“Being recognized as the top pre-IPO company for the Clouded Leopards
Den award provides further validation for the market opportunity that
Viptela is addressing and the value our technology provides to both
enterprises and carriers,” said Amir Khan, CEO of Viptela. “Viptela’s
software defined approach to solving wide area networking challenges is
positioned to reshape the industry.”
The Clouded Leopards Den competition took place at the NetEvents
Global Cloud Innovation Summit at the Corinthian Yacht Club,
Tiburon, San Francisco on April 23. Lloyd Noronha, director of marketing
for Viptela, presented a “Shark Tank” elevator pitch to a panel of
judges that included Jim
Lussier, Managing Director and Head of Dell Ventures; Janice
Roberts, Partner in Benhamou Global Ventures; Dan
Scheinman, an angel investor in high-growth emerging tech companies;
and Murli
Thirumale, Co-Founder and CTO of Portworx Inc.
The Clouded Leopards Den 2015 prize is sponsored by OpenCloud
Connect (OCC), a global industry alliance founded in May 2013 to
address the need for scaling and enhancing Ethernet technology to meet
the stringent demands of delivering cloud services.
Previously known as the Cloud Ethernet Forum, the OCC is creating an
open test and iterative standards development program for service
providers, industry vendors and over-the-top cloud service providers and
includes a dedicated proof of concept test laboratory based in Silicon
Valley, to provide ongoing testing and support for the iterative
development of OCC’s CloudE
1.0 open cloud framework.