Back in October, our co-founder Nikhil Handigol presented at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) meeting in New York on how Forward Enterprise helps accelerate and de-risk network operations.

ONUG was created in early 2012 by Nick Lippis, of the Lippis Report, and Ernest Lefner (pictured below, right, with representatives from Forward Networks), formerly of Fidelity Investments to address the need for a smaller, more user-focused open networking conference. The ONUG semiannual conferences reflect the work being done in working groups throughout the year to drive standards, interoperability and innovation. The conferences include sessions from IT business leaders, updates from the Working Group Initiative members, hands-on tutorials, interactive labs, real world use cases, proof of concept demonstrations, and a vendor technology showcase.

As Nikhil mentions, he is currently on the Monitoring and Analytics working group. In Nikhil's presentation, he describes the primary functional areas of Forward Enterprise: Search, Verify and Predict. The Search capability is a powerful query engine to search for network attributes, state and configuration details across the entire network. It goes well beyond the ability to search box-by-box, but can search on end-to-end network behavior, such as identifying all the possible paths between a source and a destination, including filtering traffic by a variety of attributes or results. Forward Verify can test all of your network requirements and policies to determine whether the current network design and configurations could potentially result in a policy violation. Forward Predict allows changes to network device configurations to be tested in a safe sandbox environment away from the live network, and to reverify if network policies are either repaired and or if changes introduced new violations.

Organizations can now analyze and verify if their network implementation is currently aligned with their network intent, i.e., the sum of all policies and compliance requirements that are generally articulated and represented at a higher, more abstract level than networking and security protocols and box configurations.

Understanding, modeling and verifying network intent is generally thought to be the first step towards intent-based networking, which Gartner describes as the "next big thing". After watching Nikhil's presentation, learn more about how Forward Networks can help your organization along the path to intent-based networking at https://nl1g1e2381-staging.onrocket.site.

After years of work, we’re proud to leave stealth today and officially unveil Forward Networks.

Our Background

My three co-founders: Brandon Heller, Nikhil Handigol, Peyman Kazemian and I were fortunate to be members of the team that created Software Defined Networking while working on our PhDs at Stanford University. During our research, we built and operated OpenFlow-based networks from scratch. For these types of networks, very few network software programs and tools were applicable — making the operation, maintenance, and improvement of such bleeding edge networks extremely difficult, and labor intensive. Later, we talked with a variety of network operators, and to our surprise, learned that the pain we had felt running some of the earliest OpenFlow networks, was the same pain felt by those running any type of enterprise network.

Given our experience with Software Defined Networking, we knew that the trajectory for networking was towards larger, faster changing networks. So any pain felt today, was only going to get worse. And left unchecked, such pain would ultimately prevent progress in networking. This was an unacceptable outcome from our point of view.

In 2013 we graduated, and have since assembled a team of the most talented individuals I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. Our team spans the gamut of experience, from creating the largest of distributed systems, operating some of the most complex networks in existence, to building user experiences used daily by thousands of individuals.

The Problem

Here are a few characteristics of modern enterprise networks:

• Diverse - typically containing gear from a variety of vendors, each with their own unique operating system(s) configured and operated differently from all others
• Large - anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of network devices, each of which contains hundreds to over half a million rules governing individual device behavior
• Fragile - even in well architected, physically redundant networking environments, the network can be one mistaken change away from a major business impacting outage

Current networking software does not address the cognitive burdens placed on network operators by such networks. Thus we see networks that are slow to evolve, susceptible to security vulnerabilities, and frequently fail.

The Solution

Solving such major challenges required a correspondingly major breakthrough to improve the state of the art. This came for our co-Founder Peyman, when he published the world’s first paper detailing techniques for how to both accurately model complex network device behavior, and formally verify critical properties of networks. These techniques have been used in other areas where the system is complex, and failure has catastrophic financial or safety impacts such as integrated circuits, communication, software, and aerospace industries. Network outages and breaches can clearly be catastrophic financially, and increasingly impact safety as well.

At Forward Networks, we are drawing on years of experience in this area, including Peyman’s work at Stanford, plus our three years of applied research. We use these techniques to build the world’s most accurate software-copy of your network, using what we have named the Forward Platform. On top of the Forward Platform, we have created three initial applications:

• Forward Search: Instant access to the entire end-to-end behavior of the network, i.e. searchable access to every possible way the network can forward traffic. Without needing to send packets, you get the full layer 2 through 4 details of what happens at every device along a selected path.
• Forward Verify: Ensures the correctness of the network’s forwarding behavior and security posture. It instantly uncovers inconsistencies between intent (network policy) and actual operational behavior by validating user-defined high-level policies, also known as “checks.”
• Forward Predict: Provides comprehensive answers as to how proposed configuration change(s) will affect not only the device on which the change(s) would be applied, but also how change(s) affect the behavior of the entire network environment, including the impact on applications using it - without ever touching your production environment.

These applications eliminate much of the manual, error-prone activity by network operators today, enabling more efficient workflows with degrees of accuracy and correctness never before available in networking.

Customer Traction

Today’s announcement follows on the heels of significant customer success. Some of the world’s top companies in the financial, telco, and IT services verticals are already relying on Forward Networks to keep their networks healthy and operated efficiently.

Barry Sheils, Vice President of Global Network Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, stated that “The Forward Platform enables us to better understand the end-to-end behavior of our data center networks, resolve issues faster, and proactively prevent network events. The results are improved agility, increased productivity and reduced network incidents.”

"As cloud computing increases in importance there has never been a time where data center network availability and security have been so important," said Peter Christy, Research Director with 451 Research. "There couldn't be a better time for much needed advanced "big data" and analytics platform like Forward Networks to be brought to market."

What’s Next for Forward Networks

The validation and recognition exemplified by our customer success and upcoming pipeline is amazing. We’re thrilled that investors and customers alike believe so strongly in our product and vision. As we leave stealth today, we’ll continue to drive customer traction, improve our product, grow our business and shake up what has traditionally been a sluggish industry.

Stay tuned for exciting updates from Forward Networks — you’ll be hearing a lot more from us soon!