Application Networking Leader Receives Strong Commitments from Large Enterprises and Expands Management Team with the Addition of Neeraj Poddar as the Director of Engineering
Solo.io, the application networking company, announced first half 2021 results with 500+% quarter-over-quarter growth, a 95% customer renewal rate, and 200+% net dollar growth in renewals. Solo.io has deepened its engineering leadership and Istio expertise with the appointment of Neeraj Poddar as Director of Engineering. Poddar, who currently serves on the Istio Technical Oversight Committee and Steering Committee, joins current and former Istio Steering Committee members Lin Sun (Director of Open Source) and Christian Posta (Global Field CTO). He will work with both at Solo.io to drive the next generation of enterprise service connectivity product offerings. Solo.io also announced it has been recognized by GigaOm as an Outperformer and Leader in the GigaOm Radar Report for Service Mesh. This growth in sales and industry recognition are a testament to the continued Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge product innovation delivered throughout 2021 as well as the company’s leadership within the Istio and Envoy open source community.
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“A company’s customer roster tells you a lot about that organization. We’ve signed nine Fortune 500/Global 500 organizations, including two of the top five telecom companies and one of the top five software companies. The fact that we have commitments from several large, market-leading enterprises underpins our product and industry innovation,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io. “We also have multiple noted Istio experts who have joined our team — including our newest addition, Neeraj Poddar. This further speaks to Solo.io’s investment in Istio as the gold standard service mesh for the modern enterprise.”
Company and Customer Growth
Throughout 2021, Solo.io continues to experience significant customer and booking growth:
- 500+% quarter-over-quarter growth
- 50% year-over-year growth in employee count
- 95% customer renewal rate
- 200+% net dollar growth in renewals
- The addition of nine Fortune 500/Global 500 customers including two of the top five telecom companies, one of the top five software companies, and one of the top 10 companies in financial services, autos, and health insurance
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The company also announced that Neeraj Poddar has joined as Director of Engineering, further building Solo.io’s Istio expert bench. Poddar, an open source enthusiast, is a long-term contributor and maintainer of the Istio project and currently serves on the Istio Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and Steering Committee. At Solo.io, Poddar joins current and former Istio Steering Committee members and noted Istio experts Lin Sun and Christian Posta. Poddar has extensive expertise in networking, security, and cloud native technologies and brings in his unique experience of building enterprise products and leading engineering teams in early-stage startups.
“The key to building successful products based on open source technologies is rapid innovation, and the engineering team at Solo is at the center of driving innovation in the service mesh space,” said Neeraj Poddar. “I look forward to leading this high-caliber team on its mission to deliver innovative solutions that solve real-world enterprise use cases.”
Product Innovation
Solo.io announced several industry “first and only” product updates that allow organizations to connect application services, service meshes, clusters, and clouds. During 2021, the company:
- Announced the general availability (GA) of Gloo Mesh Enterprise, an enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native solution for multi-cluster and multi-mesh service mesh management. Gloo Mesh Enterprise provides organizations with a comprehensive and simplified experience for service mesh management based on Istio, the industry standard service mesh, and Envoy, the de-facto industry sidecar proxy data plane.
- Announced expanded capabilities for its Gloo Mesh Enterprise platform that deliver both service mesh management and a full-featured API gateway built on or for Istio environments — all customizable for any requirements. Gloo Mesh Enterprise now also includes Gloo Mesh Gateway, a full-featured API gateway, along with Gloo Portal, the industry’s only multi-cluster, native developer portal for Istio.
- Unveiled Gloo Cloud, the first and only Istio Service Mesh as a Service for any cloud that enables organizations to discover, connect, secure, observe, and federate their service traffic across clusters, data centers, and clouds.
- Announced the general availability of the company’s API gateway based on Envoy Proxy, Gloo Edge 1.8, which is bundled with Gloo Portal 1.0, a full-feature developer portal for API management to catalog and share APIs.
- Announced support for SOAP — the only vendor in the market to offer this critical feature for modern, cloud native support.
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Industry Recognition + Events
Solo.io continues to develop products that enable modern service connectivity while influencing the direction of Istio. Solo.io was recognized in the recent GigaOm Radar for Service Mesh report for “not only providing extended Istio support, but also an enhanced, production-ready version of open source Istio and Envoy, with additional innovation in Gloo Edge, Gloo Cloud, and WebAssembly Hub.”
Also, Solo.io hosted SoloCon, the company’s first digital user conference, on March 23-25, 2021. SoloCon, an interactive, community-driven conference featuring industry speakers, technical sessions and hands-on workshops, attracted more than 1,000 participants. Industry experts, technical leaders, and customers shared best practices for adopting, applying, and using service mesh with cloud native technologies. Topics covered included service mesh management, API gateways, WebAssembly (Wasm), and cloud-native API management.
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