Barely three weeks after another team of Cisco Systems Inc. veterans raised funding to disrupt how the corporate network is managed, CloudGenix, Inc. is following suit with a new $25 million round of its own to pursue the same goal. The capital infusion will help fuel its efforts to change the way organizations scale their applications across geographies.

The startup offers a software-based alternative to the powerful routers that founder Kumar Ramachandran helped develop during his tenure as the head of product for Cisco’s WAN business, promising to provide up to twice the performance at  half the cost. The secret is that CloudGenix moves management one layer of abstraction up from the hardware to the services and locations that it’s meant to serve.

That reduces the amount of effort required to translate business requirements into operations, allowing administrators to regulate consumption and security across different types of connections without worrying about the implementation details. And the ability to handle all of that from a centralized console in turn makes it easier to deliver services to remote offices at the further reaches of the network.

CloudGenix says that policies defined in its controller are automatically extended to new end-points, which removes yet another chunk of manual work and reduces the burden on the edge in the process, thereby enabling branch offices to make do with cheap white-box networking equipment. That adds acquisition savings from not having to pay a premium for Cisco-branded routers on top of the economies gained through cutting manual overhead, which is presumably how the startup reached its figure of four times better price-performance.

The pitch is not particularly unique among the dozens of software-defined networking vendors promising order-of-magnitude efficiency improvements over traditional gear, but CloudGenix has nonetheless managed to recruit customers like Coca-Cola Co. and Columbia Sportswear Co., and that has caught the attention of some of the biggest names in the investment community.

Bain Capital Ventures led the new $25 million round, adding the startup’s name next to technology success stories such as LinkedIn Inc. and DoubleClick, now part of Google, that have previously received funding from the private equity giant. The investment also saw the participation of early-stage stalwart stalwart Charles River Ventures and the Mayfield Fund.

CloudGenix plans to spend the cash, which bumps its total raised to the $30 million mark, on hiring more developers and salespeople. That levels the playing field against vIPtela Inc., another software-defined networking startup gunning for the WAN that also hit the scene last year and previously received $33.5 from investors.

Image by Noah Sussman via Flickr