Founded in 2017 by Will Mitchell, VETRO was created to address the gap in fiber management tools by offering a cloud-native, visual platform that is intuitive, scalable, and designed specifically for fiber operators. With a mission to visualize a connected world, VETRO transforms complex fiber data into actionable insights, enabling faster decision-making and seamless collaboration.
By emphasizing radical simplicity, VETRO eliminates the need for heavy customization, providing a scalable solution that supports fiber-to-the-home networks, large data centers, and beyond. As fiber deployment accelerates, VETRO remains at the forefront of innovation, empowering operators to manage and optimize their networks with ease.
Linda Hardesty:
Hi, everybody. I'm Linda Hardesty, Chief Analyst for Communications Technologies at Fierce Network, and I'm here today with Will Mitchell. He's founder and CEO of VETRO. Welcome, Will.
Will Mitchell:
Hi, Linda. Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Linda Hardesty:
We're just going to chat a little bit about the company today. So my first question is, can you tell us about the origins of VETRO? Was there a specific moment that sparked the idea for the company, and when was that?
Will Mitchell:
We are a product company, a software product company that emerged from a services business. So we were building mapping software. We were building mapping solutions under contract for others in the late 2000s and early '10s. We were doing work in the telecommunications arena, and we got a lot of exposure to the problem space of wireline mapping, specifically, the need for fiber management, fiber documentation tooling that was not being met by the legacy offerings in the space. It was pretty basic. They were working in Google Earth and spreadsheets on the one hand, on the light end, or they had very, very heavy enterprise on-prem, legacy tooling and systems on the high end. There was an opportunity to do something innovative, something different, something just right in the middle, and that led us to forming VETRO and becoming a product company in 2017.
Linda Hardesty:
Does VETRO have a particular mission, and how does that mission translate into the day-to-day work of your team?
Will Mitchell:
Yeah, we do. We have a vision statement that is visualizing a connected world, and that ties into our mission of building the best software to enable the operators who are building the networks that do connect people. Our platform is a highly visual data management solution centered around mapping information of physical layer networks of internet infrastructure. We make it actionable. We deliver an operational inventory, an actionable operational inventory of the physical layer, if you will. That visualization translates into a lot of eyeballs and a lot of consumption, decision-making support. We have insights being derived through visualizations of complex data. We have complex process being really simplified and delivered surgically to the right hands and the right eyeballs in the right place, in the right time.
Linda Hardesty:
Fiber broadband companies have worked with different mapping tools over the many years. How is VETRO challenging the status quo and disrupting this market?
Will Mitchell:
This certainly is not a new thing to try and map a network. I go back 30 years in the GIS context, and what we saw in the space and discovered through interacting with network operators, again, was that they were tied to a variety of tools that weren't quite right. They might be leveraging CAD, and drafting, and drawing approaches and tools to create records, to create as-builts. They might be leveraging very specialized tooling that is for use by specialists.
What's changed now is that rather than take a horizontal or a generic solution, whether it's CAD, GIS, or some other engine, and try, and chisel it, and tailor it, and bend it into a fiber context, we started from scratch. We started, literally, on a whiteboard, talking to customers and saying, "If you could have anything you wanted in a fiber management solution, what would it look like?" We built from the ground up, and that resulted in something that I think is a much cleaner fit, much less baggage, much less overhead than what you might have in the bending of a horizontal system in.
Linda Hardesty:
Looking ahead, what are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities you see for VETRO in the next 5 to 10 years?
Will Mitchell:
There are no shortage of challenges. We're working in an industry in transition. There's rapid deployment of new fiber networks. I would say in the fiber to the home side, the race is only halfway run. There's a lot of build going on that will continue for the next 5 to 10 years. But commercial and business fiber networks are once again experiencing heavy capital investment due in no short part to the data center boom that's starting and coming. All the data center proliferation and construction requires a whole lot of fiber to connect them up and to connect point to point between places. That's a new opportunity, yeah, that we're addressing head on. These are all areas where we're investing in both innovation and automation.
Linda Hardesty:
Thank you so much, Will. It's been awesome chatting with you. I appreciate it.
Will Mitchell:
Yeah. Thank you too.