Nearly three months into its new life as a Seattle company, network management software company AppViewX is nearing profitability and planning to expand as one of the last pieces of the data center starts to modernize.
The company, run by former F5 Networks CEO Manny Rivelo, has developed a software platform for automating many of the manual tasks network engineers at data centers are forced to do in order to keep a modern network up and running. The AppViewX Platform also gives users a dashboard view of their network operations and can manage security policies across a network.
For example, AppViewX can balance loads across the network in response to surges in demand based on automated policies, or discover all the SSL certificates — often used for online credit card transaction processing — on a given network and make sure they’re all supposed to be there. The technology has been installed in more than 250 data centers around the world, according to the company.
Data centers have become much more nimble over the past few years thanks to technologies like containers and DevOps thinking, but networking infrastructure is still a manual task inside many companies, Rivelo said. That’s changing: AppViewX worked with a customer that was taking eight days — a shockingly long time in the real-time world of today’s internet businesses — to implement networking configuration changes, reducing the time it took to make those changes to half a day, he said.
“We can automate the task and get it done at a fraction of the cost,” Rivelo said.
This notion of “DevOps for networking” is gaining steam: Seattle’s Intentionet raised $3 million earlier this year to tackle similar problems, and companies like Red Hat’s Ansible and Puppet are also working on tools for automating network infrastructure.
AppViewX was spun out of a larger company called Payoda last year, and officially became its own entity on April 1st, completing a move from Texas. The company has just over 300 employees, most of whom are based in India, but the executive leadership of the company has set up shop in Seattle. Rivelo led Seattle’s F5 Networks for several years before stepping down in 2015 due to an unspecified “personal conduct matters.”
The company will probably raise a funding round later this year to support its growth, Rivelo said. AppViewX could have been profitable in the most recent quarter closing today, he said, but chose instead to focus on growth next quarter by investing in additional employees. It sounds like the company will hire a few engineers in Seattle, but its engineering lead is in India and the bulk of its engineers will remain there, Rivelo said.
A recent filing with the SEC involving a $42.4 million funding was related to the company setting up an internal stock option pool for employees, and was not part of a new funding round, Rivelo said.
