Three years after banding together to take on the data center market, David Erickson and his team of Stanford Ph.D.s at Forward Networks Inc. are finally ready to reveal what they’ve been working on.

The startup is emerging from stealth today with a platform that promises to help companies improve the reliability and security of their internal traffic using a method called formal verification. Born from the efforts of tech firms such as Intel Corp. to improve their products’ integrity, the technique makes it possible to model every potential state of a system down to its individual components. The process thus uncovers all the scenarios where a malfunction might occur and enables researchers to fix problems before they happen in the real world.

Of course, modeling a single processor or program is much different than a data center network with billions upon billions of potential states. But the Forward team nontheless managed to pull it off thanks to a 2012 breakthrough from cofounder Peyman Kazemian. The researcher went on to earn his electrical engineering Ph.D. on the back of the discovery later in the same year, shortly before David Erickson graduated from Stanford with his own doctorate.

Erickson, who now serves as the chief executive of Forward, detailed in a blog post that his team’s platform applies formal verification via three modules each focused on a different aspect of network operations. The first is called Forward Search and serves as a sort of discovery engine, modeling every possible way that traffic can move around in a given environment. Its findings are used by the other two applications to illuminate potential operational issues.

The data first passes through Forward Verify, which checks the traffic statistics from Forward Search against network management policies to find inconsistencies. Administrators can consult the results of the analysis to identify configuration issues that may cause unwanted behavior in the event of a traffic spike, breach attempt or some other scenario. They’re then able to use Forward Predict, the third and final component of the startup’s platform, to see how the tweaks they make will change the situation. The latter tool is also useful for double-checking everyday modifications such as firmware upgrades before rolling them out to production.

At a high level, Forward Networks’ platform offers the same benefits as Veriflow Inc.’s rival formal verification tool, but Erickson claims that there are several ways in which his startup stands out. The CEO listed the software’s “scalability, the accuracy of the model, ease of use [and] the breadth of supported devices” as the main reasons in his blog post. This value proposition has apparently struck a chord in the market: Forward Networks had managed to land deal deals with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and several other companies before its launch today.

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