News Coverage

Platform9, a startup that offers a cloud-based service for running the most up-to-date version of the OpenStack open-source cloud software to be deployed in companies’ on-premises data centers, announced today a $10 million funding round.

Platform9, a service that aims to make it easier for businesses to launch an OpenStack private cloud on their existing servers, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures and with participation from previous investor Redpoint Ventures.

My initial reaction to the news that Google is joining the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor was to shrug it off as not extremely important to enterprises considering private or hybrid cloud options.

Startups are the lifeblood of the tech world — young companies led by visionary entrepreneurs who are willing to bet their futures and their fortunes on emerging technologies.

While many organizations today are considering a move to the cloud, startup Platform9 is offering an innovative approach to enable organizations to use their on-premises infrastructure as a private cloud deployment. Platform9 first emerged from stealth mode in August of 2014 and has been steadily growing ever since.

Depending on the source, private clouds are either going the way of the dodo or they’re growing faster than a bullet train. The reality is that true private clouds, as opposed to merely virtualized data centers, are becoming more popular.

Most of the early-stage technology companies recently participating in the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium’s Innovation Showcase have launched partner programs or are in the process of doing so.

While software-defined data centers are not yet available, there is considerable buzz building up about the possibility of virtualizing an ever-larger part of the data center as such technologies, including server and storage virtualization, software-defined networking and storage, and VDI and hyper-converged infrastructures, continue to come to market.