Fresh off a $21 million investor funding round, networking startup VeloCloud is officially open for business, unveiling general availability of its cloud-based wide area network. The company said it’s reinventing the enterprise WAN by delivering branch infrastructure as a service, via the cloud, rather than requiring organizations to deploy traditional hardware-based appliances.

VeloCloud CEO Sanjay Uppal explained that most enterprises rely on private line WANs due to their reliability, but claims these networks are being stressed by the adoption of cloud services. As such, this – and security needs – prevents enterprises from being able to enjoy the reduced costs of consumer-grade web connections. That’s the problem that VeloCloud reckons it can fix.

To do so it’s offering a lightweight CPE that’s capable of bonding multiple Internet access links across different technologies – for example, DSL, LTE or cable – and can also support a company’s existing WAN links. All of these are presented as a single link, with VeloCLoud auto-sensing the links to the CPE and auto-configuring the service.

VeloCloud’s CPE can also ‘understand’ around 2,000 applications, and so if individual apps have particular requirements it can choose the most appropriate connection for each one. Individual links will be monitored for latency, jitter and packet loss. The CPE kit is designed in a such a way that packets can be spread across multiple links and reassembled at the destination, so packets can be automatically redirected if a link degrades for any reason, all without the users even noticing anything’s wrong.

“The VeloCloud service transcends the congestion, expense and complexity that plague WAN connections today, so that branch operations no longer struggle with a networking dilemma,” said Uppal. “Our disruptive approach takes full advantage of cloud and virtualization technologies to both simplify and fortify the WAN, turning what is”.

VeloCloud is also offering some extras on top of its base service. This includes the ability to run VM instances in VeloCloud, which allows users to run different services – like firewalls, performance monitoring, VPN and web security – on different sites. This means that a user could, for example, allow social media to run on some sites but not others, or restrict it at certain times.

VeloCloud’s service is priced monthly on a per-user, per-service basis.

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