Barefoot Networks scored deals with a trio of China-based technology companies to deploy its Tofino programmable switch.

The companies include Alibaba Group, Baidu, and Tencent Holding, which are set to deploy Tofino switches running open source P4 language, targeted at programmable forwarding plane technology. Financial terms of the deals were not released.

Alibaba runs one of the country’s largest online and mobile payment services, while Baidu and Tencent are focused on Internet-based search and service.

Tencent said it expects the move to speed the deployment of network features and respond to “anomalies and failures,” while Baidu said the platform has allowed for the deployment of new network functions “like Layer 4 load balancing and network address translations right on the top-of-rack-switch.”

Alibaba and Tencent last November were both investors in a Series C round of funding for Barefoot, which raised $80 million and pushed the firm’s overall raised funding to more than $150 million.

Barefoot said its Tofino switch, which it began sampling late last year, provides visibility down to the packet level and support for speeds up to 6.5 Tb/s. The company said it’s working with a number of network equipment OEMs, including H3C, Rujie, and ZTE to build products using the Tofino Ethernet switch ASICS and Capilano SDE. Barefoot also has said its chips would appear in white box switches from Edgecore and Wistrom NeWeb Corp.

Barefoot CEO Craig Barratt said the company expects production shipments and deployments to begin later this year.

Barefoot has been on a bit of a roll as of late, having in February brought on former Google executive Barratt to run operations, and last month signing a deal with AT&T to become the first telecommunication provider to announce deployment of the Barefoot switches, with the operator installing Tofino-based white boxes running SnapRoute's FlexSwitch Network Operating System (NOS) in parts of its existing MPLS-based networks.