In French nuage means cloud and that’s the market Alcatel-Lucent spinoff Nuage is playing in with it’s SDN overlay technology, which according to Sharif, “works on any hypervisor or any cloud platform.”

The Nuage software defined networking (SDN) system, initially launched in 2013, is to overlay what it calls its virtual services platform (VSP) over an existing underlying network infrastructure.

According to Sharif, Nuage offers a new approach to networking using virtualisation and cloud-based architecture in an open source cooperative ecosystem - unlike their legacy competitors.

“Cisco and VMware want to maintain their foothold (in the market) by using a lock-in strategy,” says Amir.

“They want to replace what the customer has with their own technology.

“In contrast, we approach the market in a unique way. We work with the customer to operate with its existing vendors. We want to promote an open ecosystem environment. We embrace open protocols and leverage existing systems.”

To that end, Nuage, has been steadily building up an array of open source partners into what it calls the Nuage Networks Ecosystem, which includes companies such as cloud hardware, software and virtualisation players such as Citrix, Red hat, Canonical, Suse, Oracle and HP; as well as networking players such as Palo Alto Networks, F5, AVI, Infoblox and a number of others.

“We chose these partners because they are already proven in an operational setting,” said Sharif.

Two years on from its initial launch, Nuage can cite just a handful of customer sites such as University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, BBVA Bank in Europe, plus three other undisclosed “major financial institutions” in Europe and one in the US. (UPDATE clarification from Nuage PR: Globally there are more than 20 production deployments and 70+ trials. Customers running the software in production include China Telecom Cloud (CTCC), Numergy, evonet, OVH and Telus. There are several other financial institutions and cloud service providers, but as is often the case in these environments, they have asked to keep their identity undisclosed. In Australia and New Zealand Nuage has a service provider, cloud service provider and enterprise organisations either currently in trial, or about to enter trial.)

However, as the cloud disruption of traditional legacy architectures in the business and government sectors continues, Nuage appears well placed to capitalise on the SDN trend.