While OpenStack is once again in the spotlight following Dell's exit from public cloud, in the background, more venture bets are being placed on OpenStack. The latest is a new $10 million, Series B round for Cloudscaling. The company provides an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system. The funding comes from Trinity Ventures and two new big name tech investors: network equipment maker Juniper Networks (through its Junos Innovation fund), and storage specialist Seagate.
“This financing round caps a tremendous year of momentum for the company,” said Michael Grant, CEO of Cloudscaling. "That momentum affirms the voice of the market, clearly stating that customers want more than OpenStack. They want an on-premise, OpenStack-based private or public cloud turnkey system solution that delivers architectural and behavioral fidelity with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services. Our Open Cloud System product delivers on that need to enable hybrid cloud application deployments that span private and public cloud services."
In 2013 Cloudscaling has secured key customer wins with LivingSocial, EVault, Ubisoft and DataFort, launched a channel partner program, and announced support for OpenStack Grizzly in the third generation of its OCS technology, Open Cloud System 2.5.
Partnership With Juniper
When Cloudscaling announced Open Cloud System 2.5 in April, it was also the first step of its partnership with Juniper through the integration of Juniper’s virtual network control (VNC) technology, JunosV Contrail, into Open Cloud System (OCS). OCS is a turnkey, OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system for enterprises, SaaS providers and cloud service providers. Juniper liked what they saw.
“Juniper Networks and Cloudscaling share a vision of how cloud infrastructure should be built and operated to support a new generation of cloud-aware workloads,” said Jeff Lipton, VP of venture and strategic investments at Juniper. “Collaborating to integrate our technology into OCS was just the first step. We are excited to continue our work with Cloudscaling and support the company as a strategic investor.”
Cloudscaling and Juniper plan to continue delivering innovative, joint networking solutions that are open and standards-based to support elastic cloud services and a new generation of enterprise workloads.
Cloudscaling also joined the Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance Partner program in April. Seagate liked what it saw.
“Seagate and Cloudscaling are working together on innovative solutions of jointly-optimized cloud systems supported by Seagate products,” said Rocky Pimentel, EVP and chief sales and marketing officer, Seagate. “We are pleased to deepen our relationship with them as an equity investor and be part of a collaborative effort to define and promote open source standards for cloud computing."
Cloudscaling and Seagate are focused on the development of optimized storage solutions for OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure.
Seagate and Juniper join Trinity Ventures, which so far seems happy with Cloudscaling’s prospects. “Cloudscaling has executed on a vision of elastic cloud infrastructure as a turnkey solution that many agree with but few have delivered,” said Dan Scholnick, general partner, Trinity Ventures. “The team has gained new customers and partners at an accelerating pace, highlighting their success at tapping an emerging, growing need among enterprise, SaaS and service provider segments.”
