ParkMyCloud
What they do: Automate cloud server scheduling.
Problem they solve: According to ParkMyCloud, “companies spend billions of dollars a year on 24×7 servers” in public clouds, even though many of those resources sit idle much of the time.
ParkMyCloud contends that, on average, 66% of what you spend on the public cloud is on compute (servers), and 45% of that is on non-production systems, such as development, test, and QA – servers that’s don’t need to run 24×7.
Added up, these idle resources translate into $6B in excess costs each year.
How they solve it: ParkMyCloud is an app that enables businesses to “park” or pause non-production servers when they aren’t needed.
Users can automatically schedule on/off times for their idle, non-production cloud computing servers, so they pay only for the time they actually use and avoid wasted spending.
#Big50-2017 startup ParkMyCloud enables businesses to pause non-production servers, saving them as much as 60% on cloud costs. https://wp.me/p330ZZ-kM Share on XParkMyCloud says that their app can be set up and configured in 15 minutes or less, and on the very next day, users get a report telling them how much they saved in the previous 24 hours by simply automating the mundane task of turning idle servers off.
With Amazon, for instance, ParkMyCloud claims it can save companies up to 60% on their AWS bills.
Headquarters: Dulles, VA
CEO: Jay Chapel, who previously served as CEO of Ostrato. Before that, he was a business unit executive at IBM/Tivoli.
Year Founded: 2015
Funding: ParkMyCloud has raised $1.65 million in seed funding from Cofounders Capital, along with contributions from Tom McGowan of ENRGM LLC, Thomas E. Kolassa, Lane Bess of Bess Ventures, and John Chapel of White Hall Capital.
Competitors include: For now, the cloud “continuous cost control” space is wide open. Other startups in or adjacent to this niche include Skeddly, Botmetric, CloudMGR, and GorillaStack.
ParkMyCloud could also compete indirectly with both cloud visibility and cloud management companies that could eventually encroach on their territory.
Cost-visibility players include CloudChekr, Cloudyn, Cloudability, and Cloud Health Technologies.
The Cloud Management Platform space could also play against (or absorb) the cost-control niche. However, these large, feature-heavy platforms – such as Scalr, Rightscale, and Dell Cloud Manager – are currently too expensive and complicated for many businesses.
Customers include: Fox, McDonald’s, Capital One, Unilever, Wolters Kluwer, Sage, Neustar, and Raytheon.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: We like ParkMyCloud’s market positioning, and even though this is a young startup that has only raised seed funding, they’ve already locked down top-tier named customers, such as Fox and McDonald’s.
The startup also did exceptionally well in online voting, earning a top-3 finish in their voting group, and they aced the content challenge.
In 2017, ParkMyCloud also rolled out its “continuous cost control tool” for the Google Cloud Platform, expanding their portfolio beyond their initial beachhead of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. And earlier this month, the startup added a new iOS app that allows developers to park idle instances directly from their mobile devices.
