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Cloud management software provider RackWare said Sept. 13 it has closed a $10 million Series B round of funding led by Signal Peak Ventures, with additional funding from Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Venture Partners.
RackWare CEO and founder Sash Sunkara said the company will use the funding to enhance and accelerate product development and to expand sales, marketing, partnerships and customer support teams.
RackWare’s flagship product, the RackWare Management Module (RMM), uses IT automation and cloud intelligence to enable workloads to be ported between any platform, virtual or physical, and any cloud. RackWare has moved thousands of workloads for hundreds of customers and has partnerships with large service providers and value-added resellers (VARs).
Under the guidance of Sunkara, one of Silicon Valley’s few female CEOs, RackWare has emerged as a go-to vendor for enterprise IT teams seeking to manage their on-premises, private cloud and public cloud applications on one platform. Customers include Blue Cross/Blue Shield of CA, Coca-Cola, IBM SoftLayer, HBO, Crayola and Zebra.
Well-Known Companies Using Rackware
By focusing on Fortune 500 enterprise customers through OEM partnerships including CenturyLink and VMware, Fremont, California-based RackWare is actively being deployed in some of the world’s largest companies. The $10 million round of funding follows $5.3 million of prior funding raised and was acquired at a time when the company is experiencing significant year-over-year top-line revenue growth and customer adoption, Sunkara said.
“Our vision is to enable global enterprises to achieve true data center cloud adoption with use cases such as disaster recovery, backup, scaling and migration,” Sunkara said. “Bringing on Signal Peak Ventures and Ron Heinz provides RackWare with an experienced investor and operator to bolster our team. By investing in the right people and technology, RackWare is poised to significantly augment our already strong market momentum.”
Plenty of Options for IT Managers
By enabling IT to manage all applications—regardless of location—in one basket, RackWare allows IT teams to migrate physical workloads to the cloud, migrate between clouds, scale in and out automatically and merge backup with disaster recovery, among other functionalities.
eWEEK conducted a brief Q&A Sept. 12 with Sunkara regarding the funding news.
eWEEK: How will RackWare be “modernizing” its cloud platform?
Sunkara: RackWare will be delivering features around self-service and integration with existing enterprise security and monitoring tools. This will enable enterprises to roll out hybrid platforms for their application developers. This will include multiple public clouds, which will be an extension of their existing data center.
eWEEK: (CEO) Pat Gelsinger said the other day at VMworld that only about 27 percent of the world’s enterprise workloads are now being processed in a public or hybrid cloud. Is the cloud adoption curve slower (or faster) than you imagined it would be, and why do you think this is the case?
Sunkara: We are not surprised by the adoption cycle of public cloud by the enterprise. We expect adoption cycles to accelerate in the future as technologies have caught up with the needs of the enterprise. That includes security, ease of use, extension of existing data centers without having to rewrite applications or changing their processes.
eWEEK: Is security still the No. 1 issue holding back a company from moving its production data to a cloud? If not, what is?
Sunkara: I don’t think security is the No. 1 issue; however, it is still one of the primary issues. I believe there are a few issues on the mind of enterprise IT architects: ease of use, billing/cost control, network and storage capabilities are all equally important.
eWEEK: How is RackWare setting itself apart from its competitors?
Sunkara: “RackWare is a true enterprise solution that can handle the complexity of the enterprise data center that includes physical servers, Oracle and SQL databases, clustered solutions, network storage and multi-tenancy. Enterprises do not want to adopt a single-cloud solution, nor do they want to be locked in. With solutions like RackWare, they can easily extend their existing data center to multiple cloud platforms, and not be locked in to any single platform.”