Cisco counting on Glue for stickiness

Will sell company's SDN WAN applications to router customers

Glue Networks, a developer of software-defined wide area networking products, has landed $12.4 million in new funding from unidentified private investors. The company also got a big sales boost from Cisco, which now includes Glue products on its price list and will compensate 14,000 sales people for selling them.

Glue's gluware software runs in the cloud and provides a cloud-based service for turning up remote sites and teleworkers worldwide. It is designed to lower the cost of private WAN networking by automating those operations and handling ongoing maintenance, monitoring, life-cycle management and feature extension.

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The software is available under a 1-3 year subscription model based on the number of nodes. Glue is targeting Cisco's installed base of WAN routers as a sweet spot for its SDN WAN offerings.

With this latest round, Glue has raised $16.9 million since its founding in 2007. The company has a "stable and hardened product" in the hands of customers around the globe, says Co-founder and CEO Jeff Gray. He would not disclose, however, the identities of Glue's largest accounts nor how many customers the company has.

That may come shortly into 2014 though, he hinted. The $12.4 million funding round will bankroll Glue growth initiatives in sales and R&D, including the endorsement from Cisco sales. Glue is also demonstrating an application at Cisco Live Milan for Cisco's Intelligent WAN (IWAN) portfolio that will be part of the IWAN orchestration engine, Gray says.

The additional funding will also pay for 30 new hires the company expects to make next year.

"We're very bullish" on prospects for the coming year, Gray said.

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