Platform9
What they do: Provide “open source-as-a-service for enterprises that need faster and easier ways to manage cloud infrastructure across multiple platforms.”
Problem they solve: According to Gartner, 95% of enterprise IT teams struggle (or fail) when implementing private clouds. This is typically due to technical complexity, inability to drive organizational change, or technology that just doesn’t stand up to the demands of the enterprise.
Private clouds also tend to lock businesses in with proprietary software and APIs, and many require specific hardware or appliances. Others still try to force you to forklift upgrade your entire infrastructure.
How they solve it: Platform9 Managed OpenStack is intended to make it easy for enterprises to create an AWS-like private cloud, but using their own on-premises virtualized infrastructure. Enterprises can pool resources in a single data center or across multiple regions. Platform9 hosts the OpenStack control plane, removing the need for customers to install, monitor, troubleshoot, or upgrade OpenStack themselves.
Big50-2017 two-time winner, @Platform9Sys, raises $22M Series C and lands 2 big customers since last report. Click To TweetOther features of the Platform9 cloud include cloud visibility and control tools, reusable automation frameworks for various OpenStack offerings, multi-hypervisor management capabilities, SSO integration, persistent storage, isolated networking, and image management.
Platform9’s latest product, Platform9 Managed Kubernetes, is a SaaS-managed, pure-play Kubernetes service. Managed Kubernetes also handles backend configuration and maintenance.
Platform9’s open-source-as-a-service cloud platform offers enterprises best-of-breed cloud infrastructure, such as OpenStack and Kubernetes, as SaaS-managed solutions. According to Platform9, this approach reduces cost and time to value, while avoiding vendor lock-in. Platform9’s solutions can be deployed across any combination of on-premises, public, or private cloud infrastructures.
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA
CEO: Sirish Raghuram. Before co-founding Platform9, Sirish was an early engineer at VMware, where he held technical and management leadership roles and helped ship multiple vSphere products.
Year Founded: 2013
Funding: $36.5 million in three rounds. The most recent round was a $22M Series C led by Canvas Ventures. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also participated in the round, as did existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
Competitors include: Mirantis, Stratoscale, and ZeroStack.
Customers Include: Autodesk, Box, BlueCross BlueShield, PlayStation, PubMatic, IdenTV, Moz, and Tango.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: Platform9 is a two-time Big50 winner! Last year, the startup finished in the top third in Big 50 online voting for the cloud group.
Since the last report, Platform9 not only landed $22M in VC funding, but the company has also rolled out new services and landed two marquee customers: BlueCross BlueShield and PlayStation.
