Viptela Co-Founders Launch Prosimo, Raise $25 Million

The people who brought you SD-WAN pioneer Viptela are modernizing application delivery for the distributed workforce.

Prosimo emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, announcing $25 million in seed and Series A funding from several investors. The application delivery startup improves application experience and multicloud adoption while enabling a work-from-anywhere workforce. The Santa Clara, California- based company provides an Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) platform, which vertically integrates the infrastructure stack. As a result, Prosimo enhances application delivery for a multicloud environment.

Prosimo’s Ramesh Prabagaran

Co-founder and CEO Ramesh Prabagaran most recently worked for Cisco, which acquired Viptela for $610 million in 2017. He and his team in 2012 founded Viptela, one of the first vendors to bill itself as an SD-WAN provider. Prabagaran later managed the product and engineering teams for Cisco SD-WAN.

Prabagaran said Prosimo’s offering can work as a complement to SD-WAN. That’s because a big difference exists between the two technologies.

Prabagaran observed that SD-WAN heavily emphasizes offices. It provides ways to connect campuses and branch offices to data centers and the public cloud. However, COVID-19 made us think about offices much differently. What do we do when the majority of workers are not operating from a branch office? What if, for example, they want to work from home or at a coffee shop? That’s when we need to think of employees as working out of a “branch of one.”

“If you want to leverage internet-like economics for that connectivity, SD-WAN is a great technology,” Prabagaran said. “There is a layer on top of SD-WAN that you can bring to improve on the application experience even further, and you use exactly that same technology as you expand from a branch of 500 into a branch of one.”

The Alternative

Prabaragan said we need to start with a focus on the application rather than a “network-centric” focus. Prosimo provides a “per-application SLA,” which recognizes the different requirement each application brings to the table.

“You can’t treat all applications as the same, because the application today is not actually one application but a sequence and combination of applications within,” Prabagaran said.

IDC’s Brad Casemore

Customers have reported up to 60% in savings on their cloud spending, up to 90% reduced deployment time and up to a 90% improvement in page loading due to application performance, according to Prabagaran.

Brad Casemore, IDC‘s research vice president of data center networks, said Prosimo aligns the infrastructure stack with “cloud-era applications.”

“As organizations have embraced clouds … applications are not only more cloud-native, changing how they are developed and managed, but they are also increasingly distributed. Employees and customers, who access and engage with those applications, are also highly distributed,” Casemore said. “IDC finds that the result is enormous pressure on infrastructure to adapt to cloud-centric application requirements and to materially support tangible business outcomes.”

Prosimo Partners

Prosimo works with resellers, systems integrators, managed service providers and referral partners — 12 in total. Ninety percent of the company’s sales come through the channel. Prabagaran describes the company’s training, managed services and professional services as 100% partner-led.

Channel partners often play one of two roles. In some cases, the partner is a cloud migration adviser and consults the business on their applications.

“They will go do an initial discovery of the customer’s set of applications and say, ‘Out of your few hundred applications, these are the ones you should migrate first,’” he said.

In other cases, the partners focus on …