An X factor for scaling the global router market

One of the central features of today’s increasingly distributed and rapidly moving communications industry is the increasing virtualisation and dynamism of all aspects of operations, with a move to software- rather than hardware-based models.

This is gradually leaking even into areas of hardware that have remained largely the same for many decades. Take the router market, for example.

“If you think about routers today, they’re really 50- or 60-year-old technology and they’re usually managed individually,” says technology and communications industry veteran Jeff Collins. “By and large, you buy hardware, it’s shipped to you and you install it.”

Shaking things up

For carriers, delivery times can last six months or longer, he says, and for enterprises needing smaller routers one or two months. Meanwhile, IoT or cloud players may have delivery times as little as one or two days for software-based virtual routers.

However, even those software-defined routers are being managed one by one, despite today’s world being characterised by workloads spread across multiple locations, says Collins. “In that scenario, you run into an ecosystem in which you really need your routers to operate at the scale of your workloads. Today’s routers and network infrastructure cannot keep up.”

This situation is well worth improving, he believes, estimating the global router market to be worth US$20 billion today and to grow to as much as US$30 billion by as soon as 2030.

Routing-as-a-service

Fortunately, Collins has an answer that he has been carefully developing for the last half-decade and is now officially launching at ITW, with the hope of revolutionising the router market. This comes in the form of Sxalable, based in Boulder, Colorado, that Collins chairs after founding the business in 2020 and that describes itself as ‘the world’s first routing-as-a-service platform’.

Operating as a software-based service that consolidates a fragmented routing stack into a single cloud-native platform, the idea is that capacity can be globally orchestrated and provisioned in seconds rather than months.

Via what Collins describes as a “fleet-managed” ecosystem, Sxalable claims that 5,000 nodes can be deployed as easily as five under traditional hardware-based systems, while the routers’ security and operational posture can be monitored across a company’s entire global network from a single place.

Thinking big

As a serial disruptor and transformer of companies who has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, Collins is confident Sxalable can have a huge impact. He takes this assurance from founding other disruptive firms, including software-defined networking company 21Packets and network observability firm WanAware.

His team is similarly geared towards success. “I have a founding team that knows how to build big businesses,” says Collins. For that reason, he thinks it is not unrealistic that Sxalable could ultimately take a third of the global $10 billion he expects to be added to the value of the router market over the coming years.

“It’s certainly an ambitious target and it’s going to take work,” agrees Collins. “But I believe it’s not improbable for us to meet this goal. We expect to have a massive impact on the market.”

Building momentum

The early signs are promising from trials with 15 companies from around the world so far in a variety of guises, he says, including carriers, data centre and IoT providers, and enterprises.

“The feedback is excellent across the board, and we probably have another 30 or 40 entities that want to talk to us at ITW about becoming part of this,” says Collins. “It’s really encouraging to know that many companies are interested in a product that we haven’t yet even marketed.”

Something that may provide encouragement for potential new partners is that Sxalable has bided its time and trialled the product thoroughly before commercial introduction, wanting to ensure that it is a high-quality, fully ready offering at launch.

Collins adds that Sxalable is hoping to become in the router segment what Kubernetes has become in the containerisation market as a system for automating software deployment. “We hope to take a big market share and transform the router market,” he says.

Partner content: Sxalable