Thinking about Startup Timing

The guys over at NFX recently shared a blog post about timing in startups (short read, and worth it). They've identified three important preconditions for the success of a startup, from a timing perspective. While reading the post, I got to thinking - how does this apply to Indeni?

As a quick reminder for readers - Indeni is the crowd-sourced automation platform for network and security. Or said differently, enterprises use our technology to automate day-to-day operations tasks associated with network and security devices, such as firewalls, routers, load balancers, etc. In order to build a successful, easy to use product, we work with a global community of network and security engineers. Together, we all achieve the automation vision for network and security infrastructure.

Precondition #1: Enabling Technologies

To enable this, we needed a few technologies to work:

• Dozens and dozens of open-source projects that tackle various challenges in building the automation platform - such as high-performance, extremely parallelized frameworks (Scala Akka), testing frameworks (Mockito) and others. These drive down or costs of building the platform.
• Easy, global, collaboration mechanisms and tools - the Git source control technology, the Atlassian’s suite of products and Zoom.
• Virtualization. A ton of it. Both on-prem VMware as well as public cloud based. This allows us to spin up massive labs for testing our platform, and spin them back down immediately, with very low costs.
• APIs in the network and security devices we support - while fairly newer, we are seeing this going into more and more devices. This drastically simplifies the work of building scripts that integrate with these devices.

Precondition #2: Economic Impetus

Automation. Everyone is talking about it. It’s about to make the most radical economic improvement of our time. Self-driving cars, smart homes, and automation in IT, are just a few examples of where we’re all going. In the world of IT, there is a drive to automate the entire stack - infrastructure, storage, servers, software deployment and more. Enterprises understand that not only will this make them far more agile, but will also drastically reduce the costs of delivering business services, enabling them to do more.

Precondition #3: Cultural Acceptance

This was missing in network and security until the last couple of years. Until recently, the overwhelming notion was that you just can’t automate network and security environments. They are all special snowflakes. Each of them is so unique, no software can handle them. But, that perception is beginning to disappear. There’s a movement to make network and security environments simpler, with less feature sprawl and flatter. This will allow automated systems to treat them in a more uniform way. Besides, we all understand that the only way for networking to work, is for it to be automated. Otherwise, the server automation (Devops) guys will just overrun everything.

Exciting times ahead!