When we browse the mainstream media, the mention of technology is often centred on key words viz., AI, Machine Learning, IoT, AR, automation, and social media platforms. However, while these technologies take the front page, none of these would move an inch if not for few chunks of metal, cables, software, and enterprise networking solutions. Turn off the enterprise networking infrastructures and everything starting from one’s smartphone, social media, airports, metro trains and even businesses goes for a toss.
Cisco’s Annual Internet Report of 2020 stated that in just three years the number of connected devices will outnumber the global population by 3 to 1, with nearly 29 billion networked devices in 2023 when compared with the 18.4 billion in the year 2018. This number is equal to 4 devices per person who are relying on extensive network infrastructure that will require high-touch provisioning, security, servicing, responding to real-time network changes (network agility) and monitoring to keep things running.
Lavelle Networks, a company based out of Bangalore had foreseen this requirement back in 2015.
The Beginning of Success
5 years ago, in a quaint coffee shop on Bangalore’s Lavelle Road, Lavelle Networks had started a journey into the powerful world of Software Defined Networking (SDN). Having read the pioneering work at Google B4, Founder & CEO – Shyamal Kumar drew up all sorts of network challenges that could be solved by moving intelligence into the cloud.
He spent the initial time building the company’s product and taking it to field trials with potential customers as soon as he and his team could. And then from 2016 onwards, the company started finding early customers in retail and e-commerce companies.
The company soon realized that the problems faced by enterprises as they migrated to the cloud and SaaS were immense in network performance, security, and complexity, not to mention the costs involved. Thus, the team decided that the company’s vision will be to deliver the best enterprise network experience for every user, on every device, for any application, on any cloud.
“We believe that by doing this we will enable every customer to take their business to every location on the planet they wish to, because we will be there to ensure their networks are always accelerated, secured and simplified,” comments Mr. Kumar.
The Pillar behind the Success
Lavelle Networks is the inspired dream of Shyamal Kumar, the Founder and CEO, to build a next generation networking platform company. At Lavelle Networks, he is instrumental in building a world class team and a product line which is the fastest growing solution in the Indian enterprise market. His experience in building data networking products and platforms since 2000, has helped him conceive ScaleAOn, the company’s flagship network service platform built on the cloud, for the cloud, and of the cloud.
Mr. Kumar’s experience ranges from data centre, enterprise to telecom products. Among his key contributions to the industry are the world’s first wireless broadband platform – the Telsima WiMAX portfolio, and the high-density Ethernet switching platform – the Juniper MX portfolio.
The Root of Excellence
With the company’s main goal being offering enterprise solutions, Lavelle Networks has solutions that help distributed enterprises manage, optimize, and secure their networks completely, from the cloud. It is unique because so far, enterprises have done this with their computer, storage, and applications, and now with the company’s proprietary platform, ScaleAOn they can use the cloud to make their networks work as well.
The company has both hardware and software that is used in branch offices, retail outlets, hospitals, ATMs, restaurants, universities, law offices, factories; almost in every conceivable place of business, and it connects all such locations back to their cloud applications.
What sets this network enterprise solution provider apart from all its competitors is the its focus on scale and operational excellence. “Every year we have built the largest network on our technology – SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Networking) from 2017 – 2020, in India,” comments Mr. Kumar.
The Added Advantages
The biggest assets any company has are client satisfaction and the ability to address all the issues faced by the clients, and while having successfully achieved the same, Lavelle Networks also gives its client an added advantage. The foremost benefit of using the company’s solution is that the overall network cost of ownership reduces drastically, as customers are able to use regular broadband Internet connections. Furthermore, the ScaleAOn technology makes these work like expensive private leased lines (or MPLS networks).
The other benefits include deep application and user behaviour visibility into the daily traffic patterns, automated network optimization algorithms, and the ability to log into a cloud console and monitor the entire network. An IT team can now use their network (no matter how big it is), the way they use modern simple applications like Gmail or Zoom.
The Need of the Hour
While the world is struggling with a massive health crisis that has sent market economies into a tailspin, it has become difficult for industrialists to think about anything else other than maintain business continuity and returning to normalcy.
Yet, unlike before, the new normal is working from home and while this has many benefits, it has equally challenged many other aspects of businesses, and network management is one among them. However, Lavelle Networks has risen to the occasion and is designing solutions that will allow the new normal to bring superlative results.
The team at Lavelle Networks is excited about the prospect of taking its solutions into every user’s home. It is already busy building its initial platform for working from home, where one can separately prioritise enterprise and home internet traffic, including protecting the enterprise from being attacked from increased exposure to internet threats.
“Our focus on scale means that whether it is 1000 branches or 100,000 users our solution scales gracefully on the cloud. We believe that our customers will invest more and more on their network solutions, since user productivity and thereby the business results are now directly dependent on the quality of the network to the cloud,” asserts Mr. Kumar.
Forecasting the Future
Like every growing company, Lavelle Networks too has scaled up itself for glorious achievements and greater success. The company is now planning to broaden its portfolio, following its five-year journey from scratch to being called India’s No.1 enterprise network solutions provider by the industry experts.
The company is planning to make multiple product announcements to bring its powerful software to work at different enterprise networking problems. The company’s success has attracted partnerships from world leading companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Intel and thus it will be working with their teams to take its solutions to multiple markets outside India.
Beyond enterprise network solutions for the branch and home, the company has also launched initiatives to take its platform to deliver excellent network experiences on handheld devices as well, which is the ultimate frontier, or what it calls as the ‘Work from Anywhere’.
“In the 21st century, the most important business productivity factor is the quality, security and speed of the enterprise network, and we believe that puts us in a unique position to solve the most important IT infrastructure problems for our customers who are racing into their digital future,” concludes Shyamal Kumar.