The feasibility study carried out in this action focused in four main tasks. The work done in these tasks and the results obtained are discussed next.
1.1. Task 1 – Market Prospection
In this task, we deeply studied the current state of the network visibility and SDN markets, and their perspectives for the future. Our study (included in the Business Plan attached to this report) confirms that companies directly depend on the performance of their networks and that the potential growth of the current NPM market size enabled by the advantages brought by the new SDN technology.
This first task also evaluated our future competitors in this new market. We discovered that we are not the only company realizing this huge opportunity, and first competitors are starting to appear. So far, few NPM vendors plan to support SDN in their products, and only a couple of them have limited SDN support. As confirmed by Gartner in 2015 [1] , SDN support is minimal in current NPM solutions. Our evaluation shows that SDN-Polygraph responds to a necessity in the market and Talaia is in a very good position to take a share of this new market.
We have also started to prospect the market in order to find an early adopter that becomes a first reference in the market, and thus severely decreasing the risk of the plan and opening it to further investment. Given the outstanding features of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) developed in Task 2, the European Fed4FIRE project [2], through a competitive call, awarded Talaia with a small project to test the MVP in the Fed4FIRE SDN testbed.
1.2. Task 2 – Development of a Minimum Viable Product
The second task of this Feasibility Study focused on the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in order to demonstrate the technological viability of the project. Using the knowledge obtained with our flagship product Polygraph, we have implemented a MVP of SDN-Polygraph for network visualization in Software Defined Networks.
The development of the MVP had two phases. The first phase consisted in the adaptation of a prototype based in Polygraph to support the SDN architecture. Briefly, we implemented a representative subset of the features already provided by Polygraph, but for SDN instead of legacy networks. The second phase centered in the implementation of a particular SDN feature, which cannot be provided in legacy networks, in order to show the outstanding possibilities that NPM solutions can bring to SDN scenarios.
Finally, as mentioned before, our MVP has been tested in real SDN testbeds in Ireland, Belgium and Spain, thanks to the infrastructure provided by the Fed4Fire European project. Although the MVP still lacks many features, the results are promising and have awakened the interest of several companies that are following the evolution of our product. Furthermore, the new proposal has been presented in several conferences (i.e. TERENA Networking Conference [3], SIGCOMM [4]) and seminars (i.e. ESNOC).
1.3. Task 3 – Legal Feasibility
The third task of this project studied the legal viability of the proposed product. Talaia Networks has subcontracted this task to Legycom, a law firm specialized in legal services for digital business. Apart from the legal framework of a SaaS product, such as SDN-Polygraph, the study has evaluated the legal aspects involved in the end-user licenses of such a service, the study of the IP regime, as well as the analysis of any regulatory issues relevant to the project (e.g. legal data retention policies). The outcome of the study confirms the legal viability of the new proposed product.
1.4. Task 4 – Operational and Financial Plan
The last task addressed the validation of the operational and financial plan. This outcome of this task, using the feedback from previous tasks, is a Business Plan of the proposed product. Talaia Networks has revised its estimations on the resources required to develop a final product, commercialize it, and operate the required cloud infrastructure in a systematic and scalable way.
In order to develop and commercialize SDN-Polygraph, a financial strategy has been proposed, including a combination of public (National and EU projects, including SME instrument Phase 2) and private funding (Venture Capital, loans). Part of this development will also be self-funded with the sales of the current Polygraph product commercialized by Talaia Networks.
[1] 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD)
https://www.gartner.com/doc/2982120/magic-quadrant-network-performance-monitoring(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) [2] Fed4FIRE FP7 project (agreement number 318389):
http://www.fed4fire.eu(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) [3] Terena Networking Conference 2015,
https://tnc15.terena.org/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) [4] ACM SIGCOMM 2015
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
