Startup: Platform9
What they do: Provide a cloud service that transforms servers into an agile, self-service private cloud.
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA
CEO: Sirish Raghuram, who previously was an early engineer at VMware, where he held technical and management leadership roles and helped ship multiple vSphere products.
Founded: 2013 
Funding: Earlier today, Platform9 announced its Series A round, securing $4.5 million from Redpoint Ventures.
What I like about them: IT leaders has a new cloud challenge: they are being asked to deliver public cloud-like agility with in-house infrastructure. Many organizations start by using the public cloud before scaling to a point where deploying their own infrastructure makes sense for cost and performance reasons. In addition, IT has to deal with the emerging diversity in virtualization and container technologies since different workloads are better suited to one or the other.
“We founded Platform9 because as early engineers at VMware, we observed how customers were struggling to achieve AWS-like efficiency with increasingly archaic management software,” said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. “We believe that just like SaaS revolutionized the world of enterprise applications, it can do the same for enterprise datacenters. You can think of us as the Salesforce.com of private cloud management. Our customers come to our web site, sign up and transform their existing infrastructure into a private cloud within minutes. From there on, they can focus on using their infrastructure rather than babysitting the management software.”
SaaS platform that transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes. The platform significantly reduces the operational complexity for IT and offers single pane of glass management of Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere. Platform9 is currently in beta with a dozen mid-to-large sized organizations.
Key differentiator: Platform9’s mission is to offer “the easiest way for enterprises to implement a private cloud, with intelligent, self-service provisioning of workloads onto their computing infrastructure.”
Based on OpenStack, Platform9 offers unified management across diverse environments – Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere – across datacenters and geographies.
Competitive Landscape: This space is a land grab at the moment. Competitors include RightScale, Scalr, and Dell (Cloud Manager).
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