Steve Garrison, Vice President of Marketing at Pica8

Software-defined networking (SDN) startup Pica8 Inc. has just announced a $12.5 million funding round led by VantagePoint Capital Partners, Cross Head and Pacific Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to more than $20 million. Steve Garrison, Vice President of Marketing at Pica8, broke the news during an appearance on theCUBE at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld event.

Despite being relatively unknown, Pica8 is rapidly emerging as one of the most exciting startups in the SDN world. It sells networking devices tailored to take advantage of SDN, but Pica8’s main offering is its customized operating system, PicOS, which runs on the chips that power networking hardware. Just as each computer and CPU requires an operating system to manage system resources and make it ‘work,’ the chips found inside SDN gear also need an OS in order to intelligently allocate resources.

By using PicOS, enterprises can migrate from legacy networking hardware to SDN using just commodity (i.e. non-branded) switches. They can use just the OS alone, or combine it with an integrated solution of commodity hardware.

This is quite different from how things are done now. Garrison explained how much of the networking industry remains vertically integrated. “It’s similar to buying mainframes, where you buy an entire system from one vendor, and right now Cisco Systems is the poster child of that model,” he said.

“What Pica8 wants to do is break that model apart and sell a modular system where you have the switch itself, the physical box separated from the operating system, the configuration and the applications people are using.”

Garrison explained that commodity hardware manufacturers in Taiwan and China are capable of building some high-quality gear these days, having learnt how to do so from OEMs – however, the one thing these manufacturers lack is an operating system, and that’s exactly what Pica8 is hoping to provide with PicOS.

“We provide that piece of the puzzle, and now we have a complete solution,” said Garrison.

*See more after the video

Because PicOS is customized for SDN chips, users can customize their software better to ensure it works well with their hardware, without the need for major modifications. It’s somewhat similar to how CoreOS works – that OS is customized for servers, making it easier for IT people to keep their machines ticking over without having to worry about any of the administrative tasks that come with other Linux distributions.

Discussing the latest funding round, Garrison told theCUBE that the best way to attract funding is to show VCs that you’ve grabbed customer’s attention, and that you can do it again and again. And that’s exactly what Garrison and the rest of the Pica8 team have done.

“We’re well on our way to growth and to sustainable differentiation, building, acquiring new customers and expanding to different regions if we chose,” said Garrison. “It’s never easy to raise money but when you do get it you feel great. We feel great now, but the story isn’t over.”

photo credit: gioiadeantoniis via photopin cc