Tata Communications successfully incubates another business idea through its flagship innovation programme ‘Shape the Future’ and debuts NetFoundry, a business that reinvents networking for the hyper connected era at Mobile World Congress this year.

The NetFoundry platform enables enterprises to obtain the security and performance of a private network, while benefiting from the economics and agility of the Internet - enabling enterprises to securely and reliably extend applications from edge to core to public and private clouds, using Internet access. Leveraging APIs, web consoles and standard DevOps tools such as Jenkins and Ansible, instead of proprietary network management tools, enterprises are able to deploy and manage software defined networks (SDN) in the same manner in which they spin up virtual machines.

“Our platform enables developers and partners to embed secure, reliable networking inside their solution stacks. This unleashes untapped potential for developer innovation and enables enterprises to rapidly take IT, IoT and cloud apps from prototype to production, while meeting the most stringent enterprise requirements for security and performance,” said Galeal Zino, Founder of NetFoundry.

NetFoundry leverages Tier one networks including Tata Communications’ leading global network together with NetFoundry’s patent pending platform, cloud-native SDN and software defined perimeter architecture. It has also created a comprehensive partner community to provide customers access to a full solution stack with resiliency, quality of experience and security at the core. These best-in-class technology partners include Dispersive Technologies (Virtual Network Function (VNF) software for superior data security) and Sonus Networks (VNF function for Session Border Control). Ecosystem partners interoperating with NetFoundry’s services include Integron, a leading provider of managed IoT services to over one million deployments worldwide. Integron uses NetFoundry software to provide its managed healthcare services with the security and performance they require.

Tata Communications’ Shape the Future internal incubator has been responsible for internally crowdsourcing more than 500 business ideas with the potential to become $200m businesses within 10 years and subsequently incubating seven of those ideas.

“The Shape the Future programme is testament to our belief that innovation can happen at scale in large organisations. In a short space of time, NetFoundry has quickly built-up its APIs, channel and partner ecosystem and credentials to show how it can enable businesses to solve their networking challenges in today’s digital world and also extend software developer innovation by abstracting them from the underlying network. Looking ahead to the long-term, this opens up all sorts of possibilities for networking to operate as a function of the application, integrating the previous disparate functions of network, security within one architecture – enabling the completion of the software eats the world concept,” said Julie Woods-Moss, Chief Innovation Officer at Tata Communications.