Here’s some exciting news:  I’ve joined the advisory board of high-flying cloud networking startup Pertino (a company worthy of ‘betting your career on’ according to one source).  Why am I so excited about working with Pertino?

First, I believe in their vision.  Pertino is making the next generation of networking technology accessible for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).  Allowing non-IT specialists to easily create secure, business-strength networks available from anywhere with an internet connection, while accommodating all the latest mobile and tablet devices that people want to connect with, is part of the “democratization of IT” trend that Pertino is making a reality.

Second, I think they can deliver on their vision.  The team is really good.  The product works.  They’ve got funding.  So there’s a real shot at changing the world.

And third, as a long-time student of digital history, I know that technology revolutions don’t just happen.  Digital technology is incredibly flexible, and its development can take different paths depending on what happens at a few key moments in history.  Just because applications and infrastructure are moving to the cloud, or open standards are making the next generation of networking technology more widely available, doesn’t guarantee that smaller companies can suddenly compete on a level playing field–the Internet didn’t suddenly make big business obsolete.

Pertino is deliberately aiming at SMBs, with a product that in many ways surpasses the current enterprise state-of-the-art.  The main technology that Pertino is based on (SDN, or Software Defined Networking), was originally designed for shaping network traffic in huge data centers.  It takes skilled visionaries to shape a larger technology trend such as SDN into a platform simple and elegant enough for whole new populations to use.

Update:  The editors at PCMag.com have already rated Pertino as ‘excellent’ in their first review, and that’s just for the Limited Release version.