New strategic partnerships, a flood of new customers, and key additions to the senior executive team highlight a record first half for the company that invented SD-WAN technology

Aryaka®, the leading WAN as-a-Service company, announced today that the company closed the first half of 2015 with a series of significant wins. Aryaka closed the first-half of calendar 2015 with record bookings, record revenues, record gross margins, and a record number of new customer acquisitions. In the first half of calendar 2015, Aryaka’s total number of active customers, as well as long-term recurring revenues, nearly doubled as compared to the first-half of calendar 2014.

From Inventing SD-WANs to Building out a Global, Private Network

Today’s agile global businesses couldn’t move forward to capitalize on trends like globalization and the mainstreaming of cloud computing because MPLS and WAN optimization hardware acted as major bottlenecks.

As a result, Aryaka decided that just replacing MPLS with an SD-WAN was not nearly enough. So, the company began steadily building out an optimized, global private enterprise-grade WAN, one that can be deployed in a day and is an order of magnitude more affordable. And Aryaka offered it as a 24×7 managed service, eliminating the sleepless nights that customers have when they try to cobble together WAN optimization boxes and MPLS lines. Now, optimization and software-defined networking are simply features within Aryaka’s complete WAN solution.

To further extend that network, Aryaka expanded its footprint of global Points of Presence (PoPs) in January 2015, adding PoPs in Los Angeles, Miami, and Dubai. As a result, more than 90% of the world’s business users are now within 30 milliseconds of an Aryaka PoP.

“In the past six months, we saw the enterprise market express a great deal of interest in software-defined networking, particularly SD-WANs,” said Ram Gupta, Executive Chairman of Aryaka. “Businesses have grown weary of the compromises that come from having to choose between expensive, inflexible private networking options, such as MPLS, and the unreliable and congested public Internet, which SD-WAN vendors rely on. We help enterprises put all of those compromises in the rear-view mirror with our no-compromise WAN as-a-Service portfolio, which offers flexible, on-demand services that include everything from SD-WANs to guaranteed performance to WAN optimization, all of which can be deployed in less than a day and with no Capex whatsoever.”

Here are some other highlights from a busy and successful first half of 2015:

Aryaka Continues to Attract Customers Fed up with MPLS, but also Skeptical of SD-WANs

Those new customers include:

  • Marposs, a world leader in precision equipment for measurement and control in the production environment, deployed Aryaka’s cloud-based WAN as-a-Service to enable improved network connectivity and application performance between its plants in Italy and China.
  • Henny Penny, a global leader in food service equipment solutions and the inventor of the first commercial pressure fryer, selected Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service to improve collaboration between its global offices.
  • INTTRA, the world’s largest ocean shipping electronic marketplace, deployed Aryaka’s cloud-based WAN as-a-Service to enhance network connectivity and application performance between its sites in the U.S., Singapore, India, and China.

Other notable customers include Nordic Semiconductor; Populous, the world’s leading sports and entertainment architecture and design practice; Avepoint, which was in Inc. magazine’s 2014 “Inc. 500|5000” list of the fastest-growing companies in America; and Nortek (NASDAQ: NTK).

Aryaka Secures New Funding

In the spring, Aryaka secured $16 million in additional funding, bringing the total raised to date to $75 million. Nexus Venture Partners led the Series C-3 round and was joined by existing investors Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Presidio Ventures.

New Executive Chairman, Senior VP of Global Sales, CFO, and CEO Join Aryaka

In the first half of this year, Aryaka invested in its next stage of growth by appointing a number of new senior executives with experience scaling companies. These appointments include:

  • In May of 2015, Ram Gupta joined Aryaka’s board of directors and serves as Executive Chairman. Mr. Gupta currently serves as a director on the boards of Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), FusionOps, Unmetric, Simplilearn, and Uniken, Inc. Mr. Gupta has led teams that built the first healthcare Internet transaction service (WebMD), the first pure Internet application software (PeopleSoft), and the first application integration in the cloud (Cast Iron Systems).
  • Jim Hilbert recently joined the company’s leadership team as Senior Vice President of Global Sales. Mr. Hilbert will oversee the expansion of Aryaka’s sales team during a time of rapid growth. Mr. Hilbert has led sales teams and driven revenue growth at a number of technology companies, including IBM, EMC, Rackspace, and most recently, FireHost.
  • Kelly Hicks joined Aryaka’s leadership team as Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining Aryaka, Mr. Hicks was Head of Corporate Finance at Atlona, Inc., where he led finance and operational functions to deliver record revenues and profit for the company. Mr. Hicks has held previous CFO roles at private and public high-technology companies and possesses fundraising, M&A, and IPO experience.
  • Shawn Farschi joined Aryaka as the new President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Farshchi currently serves as a Director on the boards of Support.com and Noosh, Inc. Prior to joining Aryaka, he was the President and CEO of Saba Software, where he guided Saba from its legacy as a pioneer in Learning Management Software to becoming a key player in the broader Talent Management Suite market. Prior to Saba, he served as COO at Coremetrics (an IBM Company), VP of Platform Engineering and Operations and GM of Voice Applications at WebEx Communications, Inc. (now a part of Cisco), and Regional VP at Oracle.

Strategic Partnerships Expand Channel, Magnify Influence in NA, APAC, EMEA, and Africa

The first half of 2015 featured a number of new partnerships. These strategic partnerships dramatically expand Aryaka’s channel, while also amplifying the company’s presence in key global regions, including EMEA and APAC. These partnerships include:

  • Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute. Aryaka and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced their first joint Azure ExpressRoute customer, JAS Forwarding Worldwide. JAS is using Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service to ensure fast, reliable access to Microsoft’s public cloud platform, Azure. As part of Microsoft’s ExpressRoute program, Aryaka provides Microsoft customers with fast, reliable access to Microsoft Azure and, soon, to Office365, as well.
  • Domestic Channel Program. In May, Aryaka launched its domestic channel partnership program and signed up Intelisys and Bridgepointe Technologies as the program’s inaugural master-agent partners. Intelisys is the industry-leading Technology Services Distributor of telecommunications network services. Bridgepointe Technologies’ network of professional agents provide unbiased, vendor-agnostic technology recommendations.
  • SK Broadband. Aryaka entered into a partnership with SK Broadband (SKB), the second largest telecommunication service provider in Korea, to augment SKB’s enterprise networking capabilities for globally distributed enterprises. The partnership provides SKB customers with a cloud-based alternative to traditional enterprise long-haul private networking solutions.
  • ChinaNetCloud. Aryaka entered into a reseller agreement with ChinaNetCloud, China’s leading server management and Operations-as-a-Service (OaaS) company. The agreement will enable ChinaNetCloud to provide optimized, managed networking solutions for customers with globally distributed data centers.
  • SDN Africa. Aryaka entered into a strategic partnership with SDN Africa to offer optimized network connectivity and application acceleration to companies in sub-Saharan Africa that need access to cloud services. The partnership provides SDN Africa customers with a cost-effective, cloud-based alternative to legacy solutions such as MPLS and WAN Optimization appliances.
  • AltoRoutes, a cloud network and application system integrator with operational focus across all of EMEA, has joined Aryaka’s Fusion Partner program to enhance its portfolio of enterprise networking services. The partnership with Aryaka provides AltoRoutes’ customers with a software-defined WAN as-a-Service alternative to traditional enterprise long-haul private networking solutions, such as MPLS.

Industry Recognition in H1 2015

About Aryaka
Aryaka is transforming how global enterprises connect sites and users worldwide, and use mission-critical applications to support modern business execution demands. Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN combines a purpose-built private network, SD-WAN, optimization and acceleration techniques, connectivity to cloud platforms, and network visibility in a single solution that is delivered as a service.

To learn more, visit www.aryaka.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.