Portfolio | The Fabric

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 VeloCloud.

VeloCloud Story – The First of Many

The first step of the co-creation process is the identification of white space in the cloud and IoT infrastructure market. Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan were just transitioning out of Juniper in late 2012 and at this point in time, the market was changing drastically. Applications were moving into cloud and broadband was becoming increasingly popular. However, businesses were hesitant to standardize broadband and progress with full implementation due to its lack of consistency and applications. This brought their high-level thesis: increase reliability and expand on applications of broadband. 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. This is when they ran into Steve Woo, former Product Management VP and Marketing Director at Cisco, who had a lot of input in the discussion. He helped further refine the white space and provided a very new way of thinking: simplification via the movement of computing into the cloud. Meanwhile, Rajan and Prabakar ran into Ajit Mayya, a technologist and serial entrepreneur, and Sanjay Uppal, former VP Product Marketing at Citrix/Netscaler, at The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) event. They pitched their thesis to Ajit and Sanjay and were met with immediate interest. Knowing the complementary expertise of Steve, Ajit, and Sanjay, Rajan and Prabakar knew that they would be able to work cohesively.

Now that the white space was identified and the entrepreneurs were found, the co-creation process moved forward. Steve, Ajit, and Sanjay 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, Steve, Ajit, and Sanjay initiated the formation of their company and VeloCloud was born.

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.

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 Spanugo.

Spanugo Story – Compliance and Security in the Cloud

The first step of the co-creation process is the identification of white space in the cloud and IoT infrastructure market. Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan were discussing the major trends in the cloud industry and found that many companies were beginning to use multiple clouds in early 2017. With this trend, it is expected that applications and infrastructures would need to be transported and kept consistent across multiple clouds in order to keep steady performance. 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. Immediately they were introduced to Doss Karan, former General Manager at Hitachi Data, by Vic Mahadevan, an advisor at The Fabric. There was immediate interest and Doss was brought on as an EIR in order to conduct customer research. His findings concluded that security and compliance assurance was being neglected in the current market, so they went out to validate this more focused white space. While in a validation meeting with a MetricStream executive at a Starbucks in Mountain View, Prabakar’s former co-worker Doc Vaidhyanathan, an expert in the cloud industry and former VP of Product Management at CA Technologies (via Arcot Systems), walked by purely by chance. He was pulled into their discussion, expressed interest in the white space, and met Doss. It became obvious that Doss’s and Doc’s experiences in the industry complemented each other and that they would work very well together.

Now that the white space was identified and the entrepreneurs were found, the co-creation process moved forward. Doss and Doc 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 Doss and Doc initiated the formation of their company; thus Spanugo was born.

CO-CREATIONS

VeloCloud Story – The First of Many

Appcito Story – The Initiation of a Front End System

Perspica Story – Merger Between AI/ML and Data Centers

Pensa Story – The Utility of a Test Environment

Spanugo Story – Compliance and Security in the Cloud

Kmesh Story – Leaders in Multi-Cloud Data Orchestration

Rosetta Story – The IoT Vulnerability Analysis

Mesh7 Story – The Dawn of Application Security

OpsCruise Story – Performance Optimization within Containers

Cloudbrink Story – The Distribution of a Centralized Cloud

Copperwire Story – A Team of Blockchain Experts