The middleware built to make failure invisible - and to keep carrier-grade networks running when the hardware doesn't.
Here is a slightly strange business to be in: OpenClovis makes software whose most valuable feature is that you never notice it. There is no OpenClovis app on your phone, no OpenClovis logo on a billboard. If everything goes well, the software does its job and a telephone switch somewhere keeps switching, a base station keeps basing, and a defense system keeps doing whatever defense systems quietly do. The product is, in a sense, the non-event. You are paying for the outage that didn't happen.
The company was founded in 2002 - originally as Clovis Solutions - by V. K. Budhraja, a Silicon Valley telecom entrepreneur who had previously co-founded Fibex Systems and sold it to Cisco in 1999. Having done the classic Silicon Valley thing (build a networking company, sell it to Cisco), Budhraja went and did a distinctly un-flashy thing next. He built the plumbing. Specifically, the high-availability middleware layer that every telecom-equipment vendor kept re-implementing, badly, inside every product they shipped.
The pitch is easy to state and hard to execute. When you build a "network element" - a router, a switch, a base station controller, some blade in a rack that traffic depends on - you cannot let it go down. Not for maintenance, not when a CPU fails, not when a whole board catches fire. The industry standard for this is "five nines," or 99.999% availability, which sounds like marketing until you do the arithmetic: it works out to roughly five minutes of downtime per year. Three nines - 99.9% - sounds almost as good and permits nearly nine hours. The distance between those two numbers is where all the engineering lives, and it is expensive.
OpenClovis's answer is SAFplus: a package of libraries, a GUI, and a code generator that lets engineers design multi-node clustered applications that are redundant, scalable, and capable of sub-second fault detection and failover. Rather than have every vendor write its own brittle failover logic, SAFplus implements the shared, standardized version - including the Service Availability Forum's specifications - so teams can model their system, define which components back up which, and generate the skeleton. High availability becomes something you design in at the start, not something you bolt on in a panic at the end.
The twist, and the thing that gives the company its name, is that OpenClovis open-sourced it. In 2006 the company rebranded from Clovis Solutions to OpenClovis to signal a commitment to open source and open standards, and it adopted a dual-license model of the kind MySQL made famous: the full SAFplus platform is available for free under the GPL, while commercial licenses, support, and integration services are sold to companies building products on top of it. The code, mostly C with a scattering of Python and generated tooling, still sits openly on GitHub.
What is genuinely unusual about OpenClovis is the shape of the thing. This is not a venture rocket ship that raised nine figures and pivoted four times. It is a small, founder-operated company - roughly a handful of people, historically with R&D staff in India and Vietnam - that raised on the order of $11 million, poured something like $40 million of cumulative development into one platform, and then kept solving the same deep problem for two decades. In an industry addicted to the next thing, that focus is close to a personality trait.
"SAFplus is infrastructure software that provides all of the high availability, management and underlying system functions for your networking, computing or defense products."
- OpenClovis, product descriptionFive nines translates to roughly five minutes of downtime a year. The number looks small; the engineering to reach it is not. SAFplus is designed to catch a fault and move the work to a healthy node before a user - or a phone call, or a packet - ever knows something broke.
Use the OpenClovis IDE to describe nodes, components, and which redundancy model protects each - then generate the application skeleton.
Get sub-second node and application fault detection with automatic failover to a standby, so service continues without a human in the loop.
Lean on distributed hash tables, event services, logging, and communication libraries so recovering components pick up where the failed one left off.
Drive configuration and monitoring through NETCONF, RESTCONF, YANG, SNMP, and XML - plus a web-based director for real-time control.
Its modular design scales from a single board to hundreds of nodes while keeping low-latency communication between them.
Because SAFplus is GPL on GitHub, you can inspect, port, and adapt the middleware rather than trusting a black box.
Middleware with libraries, GUI, and a code generator for multi-node clustered apps - redundant, scalable, with sub-second fault detection and failover.
Integrated environment to model systems, define redundancy, and generate application skeletons targeting the SAFplus platform.
Standards-based system management - NETCONF, RESTCONF, YANG, SNMP, XML configuration - for embedded and networked systems.
Runtime engine plus a web interface for real-time monitoring, fault management, and control of distributed clusters.
Tooling to validate high-availability behavior, failover, and redundancy across clustered deployments.
Free and open under GPL, with commercial licenses, porting support, and services for companies shipping products.
V. K. Budhraja starts the company in California to tackle carrier-grade high-availability middleware.
The telecom industry's first open-source, carrier-grade ASP and IDE are announced.
Roughly $11M raised from investors including Intel Capital and American River Ventures.
Clovis Solutions becomes OpenClovis, underscoring open source and open standards.
SAFplus adds standards-based management (NETCONF, YANG, SNMP), a Web Director, and test automation.
The full platform is maintained openly under GPL-2.0 with public releases.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Legal name | OpenClovis Solutions Inc. |
| Founded | 2002 (as Clovis Solutions) |
| Founder / CEO | V. K. Budhraja |
| Headquarters | Petaluma, California |
| Total raised | ~$11M (through Series B, 2005) |
| License | GPL-2.0 + commercial |
| Industry | Telecommunications infrastructure software |
| NAICS | 54151 - Computer Systems Design |
Reported investors include Intel Capital, American River Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Walden International - a lineup of deep-tech and semiconductor-adjacent VCs that fits a company selling into the network core.
SAFplus has been referenced in deployments with companies including Sonus, HP, Ericsson, NASA, and Lockheed Martin - a mix that runs from telecom carriers to aerospace and defense.
"Middleware that provides sub-second node and application fault detection and failover."
- SAFplus, GitHub project descriptionQNX - collaborated to deliver a carrier-grade HA platform pairing SAFplus with the QNX real-time OS.
Wind River / VxWorks - integration with real-time and carrier-grade Linux environments.
Radisys / Emerson - ATCA and telecom hardware platforms targeted by SAFplus.
Buyers weighing SAFplus historically compared it against GoAhead Software's SelfReliant, Enea's HA offerings, and Wind River - or the tempting-but-costly option of building high-availability middleware in-house. OpenClovis's counter-argument was always the same: you can, but you'll do it slower and rebuild it in every product.
OpenClovis maintains video demonstrations alongside its documentation. Explore the platform in action and browse related high-availability talks.
OpenClovis builds SAFplus, carrier-grade high-availability middleware that lets engineers create clustered, fault-tolerant applications for telecom, networking, and defense equipment.
SAFplus is OpenClovis's platform of libraries, GUI tools, and a code generator for designing multi-node applications with sub-second fault detection and failover, targeting 99.999% availability.
Yes. SAFplus is dual-licensed: it is available as free open-source software under GPL-2.0 on GitHub, alongside commercial licenses and support.
It was founded in 2002 (originally as Clovis Solutions) by V. K. Budhraja, who serves as President and CEO.
Telecom, networking, computing, and defense equipment makers; deployments have been referenced with companies including Sonus, HP, Ericsson, NASA, and Lockheed Martin.