Perhaps your 'best' competition would be more like the Synology and QNAP type of deals. Anything beyond that doesn't fit in an appliance-style product.
Keep in mind that those brands also have connectivity, filing, user directories, network services (DHCP, NTP, NTP, L2 and L3 VPNs), but in practise they suffer from the same things small businesses have for decades: lack of internal knowledge. And since such systems are never set-and-forget, they would either need physical maintenance contracts (which SMBs can't afford) or remote SaaS-style maintenance which somewhat defeats the point.
The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days, and that's just to get things up and running. The next step up is still bigger gap than it used to be, but also quickly gets you into too-capable-to-be-a-market territory.
Maybe a better model is the one attempted by the private computing brands, I don't know a successful one of the top of my head but they generally have a NUC-like device with Linux on it with hardware root-of-trust and they present it as a portable-but-desktop computer that comes with a more trustworthy OS and network security. Some are based on heads & tails, others on Qubes OS, others just a fork of PostmarketOS with some Graphene in the mix. The early ones all failed because they just weren't useful to the average user, but the later ones didn't fail immediately while they were news.
> The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days
This is a major advantage of the mesh VPN layer. If your bare metal hosts/guests hardware have internet access via plain old DHCP, they can connect to the mesh network which is where all the special networking happens at the direction of the controller. On the mesh, every node can have a persistent static IP and dns entry, simplifying the network topology for the layers above.
Keep in mind that those brands also have connectivity, filing, user directories, network services (DHCP, NTP, NTP, L2 and L3 VPNs), but in practise they suffer from the same things small businesses have for decades: lack of internal knowledge. And since such systems are never set-and-forget, they would either need physical maintenance contracts (which SMBs can't afford) or remote SaaS-style maintenance which somewhat defeats the point.
The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days, and that's just to get things up and running. The next step up is still bigger gap than it used to be, but also quickly gets you into too-capable-to-be-a-market territory.
Maybe a better model is the one attempted by the private computing brands, I don't know a successful one of the top of my head but they generally have a NUC-like device with Linux on it with hardware root-of-trust and they present it as a portable-but-desktop computer that comes with a more trustworthy OS and network security. Some are based on heads & tails, others on Qubes OS, others just a fork of PostmarketOS with some Graphene in the mix. The early ones all failed because they just weren't useful to the average user, but the later ones didn't fail immediately while they were news.