PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 6, 2017) - Barefoot Networks today announced significant market momentum, driven by growing global demand for the flexibility and insights offered by programmable forwarding plane technology. Its customer and partner growth highlights a banner six months of business execution for Barefoot, further bolstered by Silicon Valley luminary executive hires and industry accolades.

"Since Barefoot started sampling Tofino in late 2016, we've seen the technology deployed for a broad range of critical use cases across global network environments, from AT&T to Tencent," said Nick McKeown, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Barefoot Networks. "From enterprises to mega-scale data centers and telco providers, the underlying need is the same: network operators want to customize their forwarding planes to enable more functions and features without limiting performance. Barefoot is the only company delivering this breakthrough advancement."

Barefoot's 6.5Tb/s Tofino™ switch, the world's fastest and P4-programmable switch chip, has been sampling to customers since Q4 2016, and has helped major organizations, including both large enterprises and leading telecommunications providers, boost network performance and efficiency by leveraging programmable forwarding plane technology. The company recently worked with AT&T and SnapRoute to deliver the industry's first real-time path and latency visualization. Using Tofino and In-band Network Telemetry (INT), AT&T gained deep insight into their network down to packet-level for the first time, helping to avoid any bottlenecks caused by path or latency variation. Barefoot spent just six weeks developing this visualization capability before it was deployed in AT&T's full production environment carrying live customer traffic on a Washington D.C. to San Francisco link.

Internet giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holding Ltd. also employed Tofino and P4 to solve a variety of challenges in their massive networks. The requirements for these mega-scale data centers are growing as they support new applications and services. Legacy fixed-function switching technology is not flexible enough to meet these requirements, so they are using Barefoot to develop custom forwarding planes. As a result, these companies were able to adopt load balancing, DDoS protection and INT features without sacrificing performance or scalability.

Barefoot has also expanded its ecosystem by partnering with several global equipment manufacturers based in Asia. To date, the company has announced go-to-market partnerships with Edgecore Networks, WNC, H3C, Ruijie and ZTE. These existing partnerships allow Barefoot to meet the growing demand for programmable networking in a wide range of network environments. Additional partnerships will expand Barefoot's reach to OEMs in North America and beyond.

Further validating its industry leadership, Barefoot has been recognized for several prestigious technology innovation awards. In March, Tofino won TechTarget's Network Innovation Award, gaining recognition for its ability "to bring the programmability of software-defined networking to the forwarding plane, without slowing down performance." The following month, the company was awarded Most Disruptive Technology and Best Booth awards at the Open Networking Summit.

In addition to the customer and award wins, Barefoot strengthened its leadership team when it added Craig Barratt as President and Chief Executive Officer earlier this year. Barratt previously served as Senior Vice President at Google and CEO of Alphabet's Access business, where he led the Google Fiber broadband internet service.

"Barefoot is transforming the way networks are built," said Craig Barratt, CEO of Barefoot Networks. "Response to Tofino has been incredible to date, but we've really only scratched the surface since launching from stealth in 2016. As Tofino heads toward general availability later this year, we have no doubt that our approach to programmable networking will gain deeper and wider adoption by the biggest brands in the world -- as we have tremendous momentum fueling us already."

About Barefoot Networks
Barefoot Networks launched in 2016 after two years of developing the most programmable and -- at 6.5Terabits/second -- the fastest switches ever built; twice as fast as the previous on record. By enabling organizations to define the network forwarding plane in software, Barefoot empowers network owners and their infrastructure partners to design, optimize, and innovate to meet their specific requirements and gain competitive advantage. In combining the P4 programming language with fast programmable switches, Barefoot has also created an ecosystem for compilers, tools, and P4 programs to make P4 accessible to anybody. Barefoot's founders -- Pat Bosshart, Martin Izzard, Dan Lenoski, Nick McKeown -- bring the company more than 100 years of experience in building the fastest and biggest networking systems in the world. Backed by Google Inc., Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments, Alibaba, Tencent, and by premier venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, Barefoot Networks is headquartered in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit http://www.barefootnetworks.com. Follow us on Twitter: @barefootnetwork. Follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/barefootnetworks. Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/barefoot-networks

Barefoot Networks, the Foot Logo and Tofino are trademarks of Barefoot Networks.