This appears to be another auto-vpn solution. At first glance it appears to be professional and well thought out (e.g. auto certificate management); however, I ask what is your target customer? Most companies who require a VPN solution will use a service provider or hardware appliance at the edge of their network so they don't have to configure multiple endpoints. From what I've seen consumers would have no use for this, maybe in the past when LAN-enabled games were popular, but what about today?
I'm trying to skirt the term VPN a little with this. Not only does it refer as you say to tunnels into networks, but it's also become a confusing term to end users of late because of things like HideMyAss. "VPN... isn't that something you use to hide your traffic from your ISP?"
Of the converted users so far, the vast majority of them are distributed teams. It's a peer to peer virtual network, so it allows them to have an "office LAN without an office." There's a wide variety of reasons people might want that.
Nevertheless, I am getting the impression that that's a niche market, so I'm thinking about other directions I might go with this. The underlying engine is very powerful and versatile, so there are other markets I could potentially apply it to: SDN, p2p SDKs for software developers, etc. I'm starting a market research deep dive on this kind of thing.
I can't imagine that there are no larger niches for a networking engine that enables friction-free direct connectivity between any two devices, but I'm not completely sure what these niches are. I've got some hypotheses but I want to let the market research lead.
You're welcome. For the sake of argument let's assume your target customers are small teams. I'm going to try and pin you down on one area you keep assuming is true: "There's a wide variety of reasons people might want that." Can you name 3? I can't think of a single application a team might use that would require layer 2 connectivity. File sharing is done with dropbox, email and other server or saas solutions these days. Modern version control systems work across the internet. VoIP would be through a provider...
There are a lot of other areas you can apply this technology, but there are already tons of players in those spaces.
One user has a CAD app that must talk to its license server to work. With this, they can have a license server and their distributed team can use it. (Consulting company.)
There's a few users who just like the convenience of being able to do things like share screens, drop files to each others' machines, etc. as if they're all in the same room. There are other ways to do it, but they find this easy and straightforward and the services are already built into the OS.
A few users have security concerns that make them more comfortable with direct file transfer over their own encrypted LAN than with Dropbox, et al. These are medical and financial sector users.
But ultimately I think you are at least partly correct. Most things have moved into "the cloud," so a significant proportion of users have no pressing need for direct connectivity. This makes it likely to be a niche market.
Of course you can go further and ask "why has everything moved into the cloud?" There are multiple reasons, but one reason is certainly that direct connectivity is hard. But now you have a chicken or egg problem: nobody builds apps that require direct connectivity because it's hard, and there's little market for making direct connectivity easier because nobody builds apps for it. Those kinds of catch-22 scenarios are murderously hard to escape, either technically or marketing-wise.
One application that doesn't fit the mold though is private network backplanes for cloud servers that span data centers and cloud providers. I've got a couple users who have servers on multiple providers on multiple continents (Amazon, Digital Ocean, etc.) and this lets them have a single shared encrypted private backplane with a few minutes' setup time and no manual configuration.
I've considered following that line of thinking and building some kind of "meta-cloud" solution, also possibly integrating with Docker, OpenStack, etc. The idea would be "SDN over WAN and between providers." I've gotten a few positive comments on that concept, but I'm at the early stages of exploring it.
