Balance, by design
Tula — तुला — is the Sanskrit word for a pair of scales. It is a good name for a load balancer, and a better description of what we think infrastructure software should feel like: steady, predictable, and unbothered by whatever the traffic does next.
Tula Networks builds Netman, a modern load-balancing platform for teams that need enterprise-grade traffic management without enterprise-grade opacity. Sub-millisecond routing, automatic failover, and real-time analytics — for TCP, UDP, SCTP and HTTP(S) traffic, with gRPC and WebSocket support out of the box. One balancer for all your protocols, delivered the way you actually want to run it: as a virtual appliance, on dedicated hardware, or as a cloud-managed service.
Open foundations, honest pricing
Netman is built on open-source foundations — Linux, HAProxy, nftlb, gdnsd, Let’s Encrypt and RRDtool — engineered into a single coherent appliance and supported properly. We are not embarrassed about that; we think it is the point. The genuinely hard problems in load balancing were solved in the open, by the community, over decades. What most organisations are actually paying the big-name vendors for is packaging, licensing complexity, and a support contract that answers from a script.
So we did the packaging differently. Transparent pricing published on the website, no per-feature licence matrix, no sales call required to find out what it costs. Enterprise-grade load balancing should be accessible to every organisation, not just the ones with an enterprise procurement department.
Who’s behind it
Tula Networks was founded by Jon Morby, who has been running internet infrastructure since 1992 — and moving other people’s traffic for even longer than that.
He started on FidoNet in 1985, running nodes and importing echomail and netmail into the UK in the DOS era, when store-and-forward messaging was something you paid for personally in phone bills. In 1992 he joined Demon Internet — Britain’s first mass-market ISP — while still working as a broker on the Birmingham Stock Exchange; by 1993 Demon’s Birmingham Point of Presence was running out of his living room, and by the mid-1990s he was responsible for the whole of Demon Mail: every mailbox, every queue, every delivery, for more than 100,000 customers.
Then came the years that lead most directly to Tula. At Interactive Investor International he ran live share-dealing systems across the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa — real-time trading, three jurisdictions, no acceptable window in which to be down. At Redbus Interhouse he was Head of European Operations, running fourteen data centres across nine countries: the floor underneath everybody else’s floor, where you learn precisely how infrastructure that “just works” actually fails. Power. Cooling. Cross-connects. Traffic.
From 2001 to 2019 he ran fido.net, his own B2B ISP, before selling it — and after a brief attempt at retirement, he came back and built FXRM, the UK hosting and email company. Tula Networks comes from the same stable: the same engineering-first principles, applied to the traffic layer.
When your load balancer is designed by someone who has been on call for the infrastructure underneath it since 1992, certain decisions get made differently. Failover is not a feature tier. Statistics are not an add-on. And when you phone support, you reach an engineer.
What that means for you
- One platform, every protocol. TCP, UDP, SCTP, HTTP(S), gRPC and WebSockets, handled by one appliance rather than a product family.
- Open source underneath, accountable support on top. You can see exactly what the platform is built on — and there is a real team behind it when something needs diagnosing.
- Transparent pricing. Published on the website. No “contact sales to unlock TLS”.
- Built by operators. Designed by people who have run data centres, ISPs and trading platforms — the customers of load balancers, long before becoming the makers of one.
Want to see it in action? Explore the platform → · See pricing → · Download the virtual appliance →
Questions? Talk to us →