Metacloud Offers Hosted Version Of Its Private OpenStack Cloud

Seeking to bring OpenStack to the enterprise, cloud services company Metacloud is now offering a hosted version of its OpenStack private cloud offering. Initially, the company started with running and managing production-ready private OpenStack clouds on-premises. Now it's bringing a hosted solution to market.

“It’s completely hosted. Customers don’t have to worry about the hardware,” said founder and president Steve Curry. “They can turn it on through us. We’re trying to make a measured step. We’re in a really good spot and I’m happy to say that we’ve executed really well so far.” Curry expects the hosted version to grow and eventually overtake the managed, on-premise solution.

And Metacloud is seeing growth, having closed more deals in the last three months than they did in all of 2013.  Three-year-old recently completed a $10 million Series A round of funding in June 2013.

So far the company has been leveraging Internap exclusively as its infrastructure provider. Internap’s API-driven bare metal provisioning made it a perfect fit for Metacloud’s needs for its own version of OpenStack, CarbonOS, which it is running in a hosting environment.

The hosted version was driven by customer demand. The company seeks to reduce the hurdles customers have when looking to deploy private OpenStack clouds. Metacloud works with a few industry verticals, including telecos, as we as Fortune 5000 business. Another customer who could leverage is the hosted service is the client who began on public cloud services like Amazon Web Services, but found it was too expensive. Also, clients who don’t have the proper infrastructure or in-house talent to run private cloud might be a good fit for Metacloud's hosted service.

Curry noted that a few customers were looking to get out of the public cloud due to cost. The company claims its solution is around 35 to 40 percent cheaper on average, plus it comes with the advantages of a private solution such as reliability and security. Curry also noted that some of the company’s largest customers are looking at the hosted version for bursting capacity, during seasonal fluctuations, as well as for some of the applications and data they are not concerned about keeping within their own borders.

The founders of Pasadena-based Metacloud have a strong pedigree. Co-founder CEO Sean Lynch was previously at Ticketmaster’s infrastructure engineering team, ultimately running global operations for a company with $9 billion in annualized revenue. Co-founder and President Steve Curry was a founding member of the Yahoo! Storage operations team, responsible for hundreds of petabytes of online storage, backup data and media management.