8 Telecom Industry Disruptors of 2018

While some of the larger telecom companies, such as AT&T and Telefónica, have been surfing the virtualization wave for years, we are not even close to the top. On-demand services, whether in video clips or business applications, have created an insatiable demand for bandwidth, causing IT and network engineers to constantly look for new technologies. The evolution to the cloud, namely the hybrid cloud, is the key point to support many new services and applications.

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"Right now, a large number of startups in cloud computing and virtualized infrastructure are driving innovation," said Scott Raynovich, principal analyst at Futuriom.

Here is the list of companies that announced this year:

Affirmed Networks

Affirmed Networks has been one of the leading providers of network function virtualization. On the mobile side, the company's vEPC (virtualized evolved packet core) is being used by 80 customers around the world. Affirmed Networks is also working on network slicing on today's core networks before migrating to 5G.

Apstra

Apstra has been a pioneer in intent-based networking and intent-based analytics for data center network operations. Apstra first launched its vendor-agnostic management platform, AOS, in 2016. Last fall, AOS 2.0 was launched with features including closed-loop telemetry and operational automation for both the underlay and overlay networks in the data center.

Aryaka Networks

Aryaka Networks, along with Cato Networks, provides cloud-based software-defined networking (SD-WAN) services to midsize and large enterprises around the world. Aryaka has 30 software-defined POPs and its customer sites are located in 70 countries. The company has announced an IPO as early as next year. According to Futuriom's "2018 SD-WAN Growth Outlook," at least three SD-WAN and network service vendors could exceed $100 million in annual revenue this year. The vendors most likely to reach this number are VMware, Aryaka, and Silver Peak.

Big Switch Networks

Founded in 2010, Big Switch Networks is an early supporter of SDN. Big Switch provides data center switching, monitoring, visibility and security solutions for enterprises and service providers for internal enterprise clouds, public clouds and multi-user environments. In July this year, the company announced an internal version of virtual networks that can be used in public clouds to help network operators deploy internal networks as needed.

Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks is known for bringing web-scale networking to the enterprise cloud. Cumulus' Linux operating system works with more than 50 switching platforms from 10 different hardware vendors. Cumulus also sells its own hardware/software systems and closed a $43 million Series D round earlier this year.

Silver Peak

Silver Peak, an SD-WAN vendor that raised $90 million in investment in June, surpassing the total amount it has raised in the past 15 years, recently announced that it has more than 1,000 customers around the world using its SD-WAN solution.

VMware

VMware traces its roots back to 1998 and claims to be the first commercial company to successfully virtualize the x86 server architecture. A subsidiary of Dell Technologies since 2012, VMware was briefly a partner of Cisco in 2008, but the companies became fierce competitors in the following years. VMware has maintained its lead by acquiring SD-WAN vendor VeloCloud for an undisclosed amount last year and moving aggressively into cloud-based Kubernetes and 5G.

Versa Networks

Versa Networks plays in both the SD-WAN space and the SD-WAN security segment. Versa was one of the first SD-WAN vendors to enter the market a few years ago. As of June, it had sold more than 150,000 contracted licenses worldwide to more than 50 managed service provider customers including Liberty Global, Comcast Business, CenturyLink and Verizon. Also in June, Verizon announced that it had partnered with Versa to develop new SD-WAN-based services designed to help enterprises meet complex IT management needs. Verizon was one of Versa's first investors.