White box networking reality with Pica8

Pica8 was one of the good surprise of the December IT Press Tour as the company suffers from lack of visibility. We realized that they have great success without lots of press presence.

Funded 10 years ago in 2009, Pica8 mission is to offer a comprehensive enterprise networking switch solution running on commodity hardware. The market also names this approach a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) transforming a classic x86 system to an advanced switch. Thus, the company was the first to sell in 2012 a disaggregated product running on (Debian) Linux on white box what is called a network operating system (NOS). So far the company has sold its solution to 1000+ customers over 40+ countries representing more than 3000 licenses.

This model confirms again that innovation comes from small company against gorillas who don't have any need to change their approach leading the market segment. This category is estimated to $4.1B according to Dell'Oro Group study, representing only the software portion, the hardware is aligned on the same value for a total of $8.2B.

Enterprises wish to move towards Open Enterprise Networking to reduce CapEx and OpEx, to avoid vendor lock-in selecting their preferred platform even on commodity hardware surfing on the SDN wave, to control obsolescence and finally to adopt full automation for configuration, provisioning, and monitoring. But as established vendors are in place, this alternative must be solid, fast, reliable and secured so the barrier to entry is far to be obvious and immediately means that only a few players can offer that like Pica8. Large corporations also required high-level global support meaning that the business model is essentially OEM with leading ODM platforms such HPE, Dell or QCT.

Pica8 sells 2 flavors Enterprise Edition and SDN Edition. Both rely on Pica8 PicaOS and support PicaPilot but only the enterprise edition includes CrossFlow. CrossFlow offers a double control plane on every port with L2/L3 and OpenFlow. PicaPilot provides data-center to campus orchestration, configuration and management illustrating the seamless integration and the zero-impact of the distance and complexity of networks topologies.

Pica8 leads a new wave of enterprise networking with real, efficient and proven SDN solutions. 2019 will be interesting to see with partnership such Dell.