Megaport, one of the leading startups in the burgeoning Software-Defined Networking (SDN) field, has been making strides the past few years. The Australian company has seen almost 300% revenue growth the last year, and recently brought on Tim Hoffman, former lead for Twitter’s Global Network team, as their new CTO.
The SDN market in general has been growing. SDN is a revolutionary concept for large scale network engineering. The technology essentially replaces hardware network controllers with software designed to mostly automate previously manual network functions. Now, engineers can design vastly complex SDN programs to automatically manage dynamic network changes. The software-based design gives network engineers better and more thorough control, and speeds up the process of programming routers and switches.
Megaport offers a unique pricing model, too. Users purchase a set network capacity per month but can constantly change the scale as it changes. Megaport calls this “elastic provisioning.” This way, dynamically changing networks can pay to scale rather than pay flat rates. Companies looking to expand into or even fully transition into cloud computing networks seem to find this model more appealing, since it adapts to changing network capacities.
To buttress their cloud capabilities, Megaport teamed up with Alibaba Cloud earlier this year. Alibaba gives Megaport access to its scalable cloud network. In so doing, both complement each other nicely. Access to the Alibaba cloud will, in general, cut down latency for Megaport customers. They can exploit Alibaba’s more than 150 points of presence in 20 major markets around the world. Megaport has realized that cloud computing is key to the next-generation networking business model, and leveraging powerful cloud computing early is going to set them in motion for a successful future.
Megaport has struck a number of deals with key customers, including Digital Realty, CyrusOne, Internap, Rackspace, and many others. The Digital Realty deal in particular stands out not only for its large market but for its use of Service Exchange. Service Exchange allows Digital Realty customers to privately connect to popular cloud services, like the Microsoft Office suite and AWS.
Megaport went public in 2015 and has an IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange. Megaport believed that going public would help expand their reach into the relatively new SDN market, and it seems that their dream has come true. Still, the SDN market is very competitive. With any kind of new models of network software engineering, some startups and companies will fall off and others will rise up. With growing revenues and promising partnerships and acquisitions, Megaport is one to watch out for in this exciting new space.