The "community edition" of the Vyatta networking platform, known as VC3, is the freely available version of the company's open source networking platform, which includes routing, firewall and VPN functions. Patches for the community edition are released every six months, while customers of the paid-for subscription versions of the product (a professional edition starting at $647 and enterprise edition at $897) have access to support via means escalating according to price.

The version 3 update brings the community edition up to speed features-wise with the subscription versions, adding, according to the official announcement, an IPSec VPN, multi-link PPP and BGP scaling and security enhancements.

According to Dave Roberts, vice president of marketing and strategy, that community is a large part of Vyatta's appeal. The product has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since its launch, and the company operates alongside an active community of users. That milestone, and the new software version, are helping to bring attention to a product Roberts feels has the potential to take on major proprietary products from Cisco and Juniper in the networking space.

The real selling point for the Vyatta platform, however, is price. Designed to operate within the x86 ecosystem, the vyatta platform can be deployed on standard-issue computing hardware. Roberts says this obviously makes an enormous price difference in comparison to proprietary hardware.

The example he uses is a fast Ethernet port for a midrange router. Cisco charges a list price of about $1,400. You can find one for about $1,000. A fast Ethernet port in the x86 environment is about $20.

"It's the easiest elevator pitch I've ever had," says Roberts.

The product itself is a platform for combining some existing open-source networking tools, for instance the openSWAN VPN, and providing a consistent management interface and documentation, with support.

"We are more like the Red Hat model," says Roberts, "than the MySQL model; we are pulling together components from other places, but we're also doing a lot of our own work to integrate those components. It's our belief that to penetrate the typical networking market, we need to present a user interface and a layer of integration that's much more consistent with what people would expect from a proprietary cisco or juniper. A lot of the value-add that vyatta has done - and we do write a lot of code - is in pulling those things together and really providing that nice integration."

In addition to the software package, Vyatta distributes the platform pre-installed on Dell hardware for customers who don't want to handle the setup themselves.

For service providers, much of the appeal in the Vyatta platform lies in the product's potential to be virtualized.

"A lot of our value proposition for the hosting market," says Roberts, "was being able to provision a virtual machine inside a single physical hardware system that was allocated or dedicated to a particular customer. So in the same way that we have a VPS market in the hosting world, the idea is you have a kind of virtual private firewall or virtual private router. And Vyatta plus Zen or VMware really makes that possible on standard hardware, which is really exciting."

Finally, he says, Vyatta relies on its potential to be whatever customers want.

"Because we are running on Linux," he says, "it gives people the ability to customize or add stuff. You've got a developer base that understands how to develop for Linux, so you can actually add something custom to the box - maybe it's management, maybe it's monitoring. That's something you can't do with Juniper or Cisco. You get the features and functions that they want you to have and that's it."