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The following post is by Ran Levitzky, General Partner at Magenta Venture Partners, and formerly a Principal at Viola Ventures from 2015-2018.
I am very excited to have taken a major part in Viola Venture’s most recent investment – Cloudyn. Founded in late 2011, Cloudyn sits in Israel’s Rosh Ha’ayin and has 23 employees, and in my view it’s a great example of a company that managed to create a perfect product market fit, building a product offering that could benefit pretty much any enterprise that uses cloud computing (which is soon to be every enterprise… )
From left to right: Ran Levitzky (Principal, Viola Ventures), Sharon Wagner (Co-founder & CEO, Cloudyn), Ronen Nir (General Partner, Viola Ventures)
The Market
The Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Let’s talk about Enterprises: Cloud computing is here, big time, and it’s becoming a major focus for Enterprises. In Morgan Stanley’s most recent CIO survey, cloud computing took the number one place in top spending priorities for 2015, overtaking security. How are Enterprises going to adopt cloud computing? The answer is Hybrid Cloud strategy.
According to RightScale’s 2015 State of the Cloud report, 88 percent of respondents are using public cloud and 63 percent are using private cloud, with 58 percent using both. IDC expects that over 65% of enterprise IT organization will commit to a hybrid cloud architecture by the end of 2015. When considering that 68 percent of enterprises run less than a fifth of their application portfolio in the cloud, the way ahead is going to be very exciting!
When entering hybrid cloud architecture, where you might find yourself (for example) with VMware and Openstack private cloud environments on your private cloud, and AWS and Azure as your public cloud providers, it can become challenging to truly understand your cloud consumption across your services, opportunities to optimize operationally and financially, and to consider where each workload should be placed. Even if one of these cloud vendors provides you with world class dashboards and tools, the clarity is lost in the high level view encompassing your entire hybrid cloud architecture.
Cloud brings so many benefits, but with hybrid, which is “where the puck is going”, comes complexity in management and attaining visibility.
The Changing IT Organization
Recent surveys as well as our own discussions with IT leads at large enterprises suggest that the budgeting, planning, and decision making is shifting from centralized IT to the business units. According to 451 Research’s latest report on Cloud-Enabling Technologies, internal IT departments are now adopting a service provider mentality and seek to provide business units with flexible infrastructure capabilities and cost/chargeback granularity. Business units see central IT’s role as a broker of cloud services.
Why Cloudyn is best positioned to deal with these challenges
Team
We would never invest in a company if we do not have complete confidence in its leadership. We believe that Cloudyn’s CEO Sharon Wagner and co-founders Vittaly Tavor and Boris Goldberg as well as the growing management team are ready to take Cloudyn to the next level, quickly growing their enterprise customer portfolio on one hand while taking on the challenging product roadmap ahead on the other, providing ever-growing value to their customers.
Product
Cloudyn’s product portfolio is built precisely to address the challenges of adopting hybrid cloud and the changing role of centralized IT. It is addressing top cloud challenges, like managing multiple cloud services, managing costs, and achieving overall governance and control over the enterprise hybrid cloud assets.
Cloudyn’s product offering is the only one on the market that provides one powerful console for all clouds with a holistic view. It also serves as the one main asset management platform across all clouds.
With Cloudyn’s cloud cost management, optimizer, and cloud comparison capabilities it is finally possible to answer tough questions such as:
How should I spread my workloads across my hybrid cloud architecture?
How much are the services that my customer is using really costing us?
How much has business unit X actually consumed this past quarter?
How can I save costs by correctly sizing my deployment? Should I move service X from AWS to Google Cloud or run it locally on Openstack in our datacenter?”
These are very tough questions to answer if you are not using Cloudyn.
Core Competencies
Among several companies who are in this domain, we believe that Cloudyn is the only company that provides both operational visibility and financial visibility. Having both of these aspects addressed is absolutely critical as each one can affect the other and both are of highly important considering their impact on the Enterprise.
In addition, the Cloudyn team has developed core IP that is powering its rich product portfolio. From capabilities in categorization and normalization of data across clouds, to workload optimization and migration, to private cloud cost modelling and correlating all of the above to business metrics.
Track Record
To date, Cloudyn has managed to create an impressive customer base including over 40 enterprise customers including well known world class brands (from industries like travel, aerospace and defense, communications, management consulting and more), while winning key accounts over their competitors. We believe that this achievement, as well as the feedback we’ve received from their customers, are a testament to the great value that these enterprises are getting from using Cloudyn, and represent a taste of what’s to come.
We look forward to working together with Cloudyn as it grows to become a category leader!
More posts by Ran Levitzky:
5 Key Security Takeaways from RSA Conference 2016
AWS re:Invent 2016: Key takeaways and what they mean for early stage startups
Why startups must protect access to their cloud services from Day 1 (and how to do it in 3 easy steps)
