The software used to manage networks hasn’t kept up with the dramatic expansion of networks themselves.

The Forward Networks solution is designed to help network teams eliminate network outages and reduce time to remediate errors. Its platform enables engineers and operators to visualize and search complex networks, debug configuration problems, verify network-wide policy implementations, and predict network behavior prior to deploying changes. Forward Networks builds a software replica of an entire network to analyze its behavior. Using the network copy, the software traces, indexes, and stores the collected data, monitoring things like end-to-end behavior, verification of the network’s forwarding behavior and security posture, and close monitoring of configuration changes.

Forward Networks, located in Palo Alto, California, was founded in July, 2013 by four Ph.D. graduates from Stanford University, Brandon Heller, Peyman Kazemian, Nikhil Handigol, and David Erickson.

Our four co-founders have spent their careers working to improve networking, as contributors to OpenFlow and pioneers of software defined networking (SDN). They saw deficiencies in network operations: extreme complexity, human error, and outdated tools. These deficiencies make networks easy to break and hard to fix.