Since it hit the market in 2008, Vyatta has focused on turning routing into an application for standard x86 servers, promising to help customers avoid the high cost of dedicated routers. Customers can choose their own server platforms on which to run the software. Traditional data-center routers cost about US$10,000 to $20,000 per gigabit per second of forwarding performance, while Vyatta with vPlane will cost only $100 per gigabit per second, Herrell said. Vyatta also gives enterprises more flexibility in planning, because they can add standard computing hardware over time instead of having to buy a traditional, dedicated router with enough capacity to handle future needs, he said.

As recently as a year ago, Vyatta itself was introducing new models of dedicated appliances based on standard x86 boxes from a manufacturer in Taiwan. In April 2011, it designed for customers ranging from small and branch offices to midsized enterprises. The company priced the products from $997 to $3,397 and positioned them against Cisco's ISR (Integrated Services Router) line. But those products are now being phased out.

"That was just a tactical issue to get around any buying objections if someone was used to buying a box," Herrell said in an interview on Tuesday. Appliances never made up more than 20 percent of the company's sales, he said. Herrell would not disclose how many of the appliances Vyatta had sold. Channel partners can still build and sell such systems, but Vyatta is now focused on the idea of networking as software, he said.

"I've been very, very careful to not let Vyatta become a hardware product, because we believed that the trends were going to be toward the adoption of software-based networking," Herrell said. "We didn't want a business model that was predicated on selling expensive hardware when the hardware portion of the sale, we believed, was going to go away."

With virtualization and centralization of computing workloads, more small, medium and branch offices are now running Vyatta's software on existing or new multipurpose servers, Herrell said. About 1,000 such customers have already taken this approach, he said.