Prosimo Inc., the developer of networking technology for orchestrating application delivery across multiple clouds, is giving away part of its multicloud networking software suite in a bid to attract more customers to its full platform.

MCN Foundation is a kind of starter pack for organizations moving to a multicloud environment. It simplifies the process of setting up cross-cloud network services, defining access policies, discovering cloud assets and conducting real-time troubleshooting.

The software enables organizations to build consistent connectivity and policies across clouds, addressing what Prosimo says is one of the most frustrating parts of cloud migration: building network services on top of the different protocols used by major cloud providers.

Three-stage process

The journey to the cloud typically involves three stages, said Prosimo co-founder and Chief Executive Ramesh Prabagaran. The first stage involves establishing reliable connectivity, the second focuses on applications and services that use that connectivity, and the final stage is scalable cloud infrastructure.

“We see companies get stuck on that first phase with all the complexity that multicloud networking brings to the table,” Prabagaran said. “We’re contrasting that with what we have seen with our customers, which is kind of breezing through that first step and then immediately going on to focus on apps users and services.”

Prosimo believes getting enterprises past the first stage will make them better prospects for the company’s advanced services. “We want to provide that first stage for free,” he said. “In two minutes, customers will be able to discover all the assets that they have in the cloud.”

The software is being given away without any conditions. “They don’t need to talk to us; they can just use the software,” Prabagaran said. “There’s no trial period. This is available for free forever.”

MCN Foundation gives organizations the ability to take their existing virtual private clouds and virtual networks and integrate them with cloud-native constructs. “By using this foundational tier, any VPCs should be able to talk with each other, talk across clouds, figure out where problems are in the network infrastructure and provide network-level policies,” Prabagaran said.

Prosimo said it has application programming interface-level integration into cloud providers Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, IBM Corp., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Oracle Corp.

Immediate results

“All we require from the customer is essentially AWS role access, which is pretty standard these days,” Prabagaran said. “They punch that into the platform and then immediately get a map view of all the assets that they have.” The platform includes a variety of troubleshooting tools and monitoring features that integrate with popular observability platforms.

Allocation performance management tools typically don’t include extensive network troubleshooting capabilities, he said. “Enterprises find themselves in a situation in which something that used to work is suddenly broken because somebody made an API call that broke an attachment,” Pragabaran said. “That’s why we built traceability natively into the platform.”

Founded in 2019, Prosimo has raised $35 million in financing, including a $30 million round a year ago. Earlier this year the company introduced a Cloud-Native Networking Suite that aligns underlying cloud and network infrastructure with applications to simplify cloud onboarding.

Image: Prosimo