Open Source Weblog

The company was founded in April last year as a result of conversations its CEO Allan Leinwand had held with IT staffers in the financial services industry.

“They were already using open source in their servers to migrate away from high-end, proprietary Sun boxes, which brought them to the next line in their budgets: networking,” said Roberts. “They’d cobbled together a mishmash of packages as proof of concept, but there was no-one to stand behind the project with a standard distribution, services and support.”

Vyatta was formed to fill that void. It is VC-funded, with a next round of financing to be announced within the next couple of months, and sees services and support as its sources of revenue going forward.

Roberts said the main focus for Vyatta is in “building the developer community, not commercialising a product,” and so it has made a beta, or what he called a 0.5 version, available for download on its website. Version 1.0 is expected in the Q2/Q3 timeframe, he said.

Roberts defined two market spaces at which Vyatta’s Open Flexible Router (OFR) is aimed. “Firstly there is the branch office with a T1/E1, T3/E3 or OC3 connection to a WAN, and secondly, on the corporate LAN backbone, delivering data rates of between 100Mbps and GbE.”

The product is not for the high-end, carrier class, he acknowledged, which is where Cisco and Juniper have highly tuned, robust offerings, “but look at how Linux has gone from one-way X.86 configurations to 256-way SNMP environments,” he said.

Roberts cited Linux’s progress from desktop to mainframe as an example of how far an open source platform can go, given the right momentum. To create that momentum, however, Linux required the endorsement of a heavy hitter in enterprise IT, namely IBM.

For the same thing to happen to OFR, it will need a similar patron. Roberts said Vyatta had already received some early shows of interest, but “it’s still early days.” Who would be likely candidates for the role? Certainly not Cisco or Juniper, which have invested too much in their proprietary OSes to see their user base cannibalised by an open source alternative.

Perhaps a challenger like Nortel of 3Com, each trying to get back into the game, or one of the newer players out of Asia (e.g. Huawei or ZTE from China, Allied Telesyn from Japan, D-Link from Taiwan) might care to step up to the plate.