Startup Platform 9 Focuses on Cloud Management Based on OpenStack

There is quite a buzz surrounding Platform 9, which came out of stealth mode a few days ago with $4.5 million in venture funding, and interesting plans aimed at the private cloud market. Platform 9's technology platform is based on OpenStack, and the company is run by a group of VMware veterans.

The company claims that its "SaaS platform transforms an organization's existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes."

Platform 9 also claims it can significantly reduce the operational complexity for IT in deploying a private cloud and offers unified management of Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere. Platform9 is currently in beta tests with a dozen mid-to-large sized organizations.

The company's advisors and investors include Advisors include Meraki Founder Hans Robertson, Former VMware Exec Bogomil Balkansky and Caroline McCrory.

Platform 9's strategy is to ease the complexity that IT administrators face as they roll out private clouds in tandem with virtualization and cloud-based applications. 

"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, in a statement. "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."

Platform 9's technology is 100 percent API-compatible with OpenStack, and "lets administrators mix and match Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere seamlessly, enabling them to choose the best virtualization or container technologies for their applications." Platform9 dashboards are designed to let administrators focus on a single view for managing applications and cloud tools.

For now, Platform 9's founders are referring to their technology as a proprietary fork of OpenStack, rather than a pure OpenStack distribution. The company will show its product in its booth #324 at VMware's upcoming VMworld Conference, taking place the week of August 25th in San Francisco.