The Fabric’s co-creation process is unique as it focuses on the two most important parts of a start-up: the market and the founding team. With the help of The Fabric advisors and staff, Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan, co-founders of The Fabric, have identified the white space and found the entrepreneurs for every co-created company. This is the co-creation of Pensa.
Pensa Story – The Utility of a Test Environment
The first step of the co-creation process is the identification of white space in the cloud and IoT infrastructure market. In the case of Pensa, the space was identified because Ramnath Sundararaman, head of the Innovation Lab in Chennai, created a test environment in order to orchestrate and verify software network functions in the cloud (known today as virtual network functions) in early 2015. The Fabric community licensed this software to VeloCloud and Appcito to help with the development of their products, so there was already a working product. However, the immense utility of this software caused Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan to question its broader applications, such as life-cycle orchestration for virtual network functions. This was their high-level thesis. It was broad enough that a company would have the opportunity to grow but specific enough to allow for innovation.
The second step of the formation process is the search for entrepreneurs with enough expertise and interest to help build the company. One of Rajan’s and Prabakar’s prior colleagues from Juniper, Ujwal Setlur, while offering Virtual Network Functions (VNF) to TelCos, experienced firsthand that it was very difficult to orchestrate and verify VNFs manually. Ujwal was looking for an automated, consistent system that could do it instead; the essence of what Ramnath had created. Ujwal joined the effort as an EIR to explore how to build up the test environment into a full blown company. Furthermore, they met with Ganesh Rajan, former Chief Architect at DxContinuum, who they believed would be a perfect complement to Ujwal. Ujwal and Ganesh teamed up and continued their market research.
Now that the white space was identified and the entrepreneurs were found, the co-creation process moved forward. Ujwal and Ganesh were brought on as co-founders with The Fabric and began to solidify the solution that would fit into the white space identified. With the help and support from The Fabric Ujwal and Ganesh initiated the formation of their company; thus Pensa was born.