VMware Vets Launch Private Cloud Startup Platform9, Raise $4.5M

Emerging from stealth Tuesday, Sunnyvale, California-based startup Platform9 launched a Software-as-a-Service platform designed to quickly transform on-premise enterprise servers into an agile, self-service private cloud. The company also announced a $4.5 million Series A funding round from Redpoint Ventures.

AWS-like efficiency in the enterprise

Consisting of a group of ex-VMware employees, Platform9 set out to abstract on-premise infrastructure to deliver it as a private cloud that can be used like the Amazon Web Services cloud but in-house. The solution forms a private cloud of servers and storage arrays and is delivered from the vendor's cloud as a service.

The company said several mid-size and large companies were currently trying out a beta version of its product.

Platform9 co-founder and CEO Sirish Raghuram said he and his team "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 centers."

The company is certainly not alone in the market for private cloud offerings, but it does have a unique product. Redpoint Ventures partner Satish Dharmaraj, who has joined Platform9's board, said, "Platform9 is uniquely positioned to seize this opportunity with their all-star founding team and cloud-based delivery model."

Platform9  uses OpenStack APIs, automation and policy control like public cloud services.

In addition to pooling servers, storage and networking, the platform's intelligent placement technology ensures optimal hardware allocation and enables rich policies for tiered consumption of resources. Although initially supporting just KVM, the platform will have support to allow administrators to mix and match Docker containers, KVM and VMware vSphere virtualization or container technologies.

Platform9 says it will give developers UI- and API-based self-service access to private clouds to provision instances, or automate their build-test-release pipeline by leveraging OpenStack APIs or libraries.