Platform9 Raises Series C: Letter From the CEO
It gives me great pleasure to share the latest milestone in Platform9’s journey: our Series C financing led by Canvas Ventures. I am delighted to welcome Gary Little, with his wealth of experience, to our board of directors; and look forward to working with him closely as we build the industry leading hybrid cloud company.
I’d like to share my thoughts on what this financing means for Platform9, and for our community of customers and partners.
Platform9 is at the confluence of three important market shifts: open-source, hybrid cloud and SaaS. We’re just getting started, and this financing is going to enable us to better serve large enterprise customers, scale our team and innovate with our product. |
Open-source is the only safe bet for enterprises
When I read the Innovator’s Dilemma, it struck me that open-source presents a unique way to eliminate the root cause of the dilemma. Unlike a traditional proprietary business, the broad community of open-source developers never stop innovating. Therefore, a business model that embraces open-source at its core also embraces constant iteration and internal disruption, avoiding the conflict between profit and innovation, which is the root cause of the Innovator’s Dilemma.
For this reason, I believe that enterprises will come to bet on solutions that are rooted in open-source, instead of proprietary solutions that require the vendor to lock-in the customer to remain a viable business over time. This will happen across a range of computing services, but is especially pertinent in the infrastructure space. Just ask any large VMware or AWS customer and chances are, they’ll tell you they are exploring open-source alternatives.
Hybrid clouds provide flexibility, and are just getting started
There is little debate that large businesses need infrastructure that can handle the inevitable diversity of running a large organization:
- Support for a wide range of workloads that incorporate data of varying sensitivities
- Support for various infrastructure deployments, across customer environments, public clouds, datacenters and colocation facilities
- Support for a broad base of developers and users, who don’t necessarily use a single process or development workflow
By definition, hybrid clouds are better suited to service this broad diversity of requirements. We’re in the very early days of hybrid clouds: while our offering today enables a single pane of glass to seamlessly manage across any infrastructure or cloud, we believe this is just the beginning. We are barely getting started.
In the future, hybrid clouds are going to enable dynamic resource allocation policies and resource arbitrage that will further improve their ROI and flexibility vs alternatives. We are investing in several such capabilities at Platform9. Expect to see these product initiatives to bear fruit later in 2017 and 2018.
SaaS is the future for open-source cloud frameworks
When we founded Platform9, use of SaaS as a delivery model to manage infrastructure seemed risky and controversial. However, today, we are at the point where Platform9 is managing >205 distinct cloud and data-center regions with our cloud delivery model (across OpenStack and Kubernetes). To our knowledge, we are the world’s largest cloud provider as measured by this metric!
While the industry at large struggles with the complexity of running open-source frameworks such as OpenStack and Kubernetes using traditional models, we have proven beyond doubt that SaaS makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain cloud frameworks.
Our belief is that SaaS represents the future for consumption of all open-source cloud technologies, and we look forward to further expanding our offering, by scale and by range of services offered.
Thank you
Finally, I’d like to thank all of the Platform9 community for the success leading up to this financing. To all of our customers, partners, investors, employees (and their families), thank you for everything you’ve done to get Platform9 to this point. Thank you for giving me a workplace where I can’t wait to get into work every single day.
As Chief Growth Officer, Sirish focuses his efforts on growth engineering initiatives that help accelerate time-to-value for our customers.Previously, Sirish was Founding CEO at Platform9 and led the company from its inception through several team, product, revenue and fundraising milestones.
Prior to founding Platform9, Sirish was an early engineer at VMware who went on to technical and management roles. His work at VMware led to several products, features and patents.
Outside Platform9, Sirish follows cricket, makes his kids laugh, and builds his collection of fast lenses and unprocessed photos. His favorite books include the Harry Potter series, Crossing the Chasm, Blue Ocean Strategy and Innovator’s Dilemma
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