Platform9, founded by VMWare veterans, has unveiled its SaaS platform designed to transforms an organisation’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes.
The platform is said to significantly reduce the operational complexity for IT and offer single pane of glass management of Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere. Platform9 is currently in beta with a dozen mid-to-large sized organisations.
Platform9 has also announced $4.5m in Series A funding from Redpoint Ventures. Advisors include Meraki founder Hans Robertson, and former VMware executive Bogomil Balkansky.
Gopal Koratana, CTO of Vendormate, who serves 2,000 healthcare providers and 68,000 vendor companies, said: "Platform9’s big innovation is that it brings the best of the public cloud to our existing infrastructure."
IT leaders of today are being asked to deliver public cloud-like agility with in-house infrastructure. Many organisations start by using the public cloud before scaling to a point where deploying their own infrastructure makes sense for cost and performance reasons. In addition, IT has to deal with the emerging diversity in virtualization and container technologies since different workloads are better suited to one or the other.
Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9, said: "We founded Platform9 because as early engineers at VMware, we observed how customers were struggling to achieve AWS-like efficiency with increasingly archaic management software.
"We believe that just like SaaS revolutionized the world of enterprise applications, it can do the same for enterprise data centres. You can think of us as the Salesforce.com of private cloud management. Our customers come to our web site, sign up and transform their existing infrastructure into a private cloud within minutes. From there on, they can focus on using their infrastructure rather than babysitting the management software."
Mark Schliemann, VP of Technical Operations at Moz, a specialist in marketing analytics, said: "Having worked with the Platform9 team over the last 6 months, I can tell you their vision is spot on when it comes to knowing what customers need to make a jump to their own private cloud successful."
