Two months after rumors first began to emerge that it’s raising a significant new funding round, Big Switch Networks Inc. has officially announced the completion of a $48.5 million investment that doubles its total external financing to within touching distance of the nine figure mark. The capital infusion caps off an immensely profitable year for the startup that witnessed its revenue jump more than 300 percent.

Much of the new demand came from mobile carriers, banks and other large companies in the tech-savvy verticals that are spearheading the adoption of software-defined networking. But encouragingly, Big Switch also claims to have increased sales to the traditional enterprise, where the most revenue can be made on the long run if its programmatic twist on traffic management takes hold.

Cisco Systems Inc., which dominates the segment, reported a net profit of $2.4 billion dollars on some $12 billion in sales for its last fiscal quarter. Big Switch hopes to replace the vendor’s proprietary gear with much more affordable commodity appliances that are sourced from offshore manufacturers and bundled with its homegrown network orchestration platform. The software promises to provide all the advanced management features that organizations have come to expect from branded equipment, and then some.

Like most of the competing solutions in the software-defined category, the Big Cloud Fabric hides the complexity of switching infrastructure under a centralized interface that eliminates the need to manually apply changes to every component. The resulting time savings can enable administrators to complete tasks like rolling out new applications much faster while reducing the risk of human error. Big Switch sells the software alongside a complementary diagnostics service that promises bring the same benefits to the chore of monitoring networks for technical trouble and security breaches.

In a sign of its expanding market focus, the startup recently upgraded the two solutions to interoperate with VMware vSphere, the most popular server management stack among the traditional enterprise crowd. The new funding from Morgenthaler Ventures, Silver Lake Waterman and existing backers will help accelerate the push by enabling Big Switch to invest more resources into its international expansion efforts. The outfit also plans to scale operations stateside in order to try and seize more of the burgeoning domestic market for software-defined networking.

Image via jeferrb