CloudSphere Born: Cloud Management Platform Company Raises $15 Million With New Vision for Multi-Cloud Governance
iQuate and HyperGrid combined to deliver cloud governance platform with application-centric view of cloud migration planning, cloud cost management and cloud security posture management
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on July 23, 2020 at 2:17 pmHyperGrid, Inc., in cloud management and governance, and iQuate, in agent-less discovery and application mapping, are combining to create CloudSphere.
Its Cloud Governance Platform provides enterprise and cloud service provider customers with governance for migration planning, security posture, identity, compliance and cost management across multiple public clouds.
CloudSphere is a Cloud Management Platform that uses application discovery and dependency mapping to build a data set that groups cloud resources by application. This application centric vision of cloud governance provides an improved approach to cloud migration planning, cloud cost management and cloud security posture management.
As enterprise cloud adoption continues at a massive scale, the markets for cloud migration planning, cloud cost management, and security posture management are converging into a single multi-billion dollar market.
“Cloud adoption in the Enterprise is well underway and promises to be one of the most significant technology shifts in this decade,” said Patrick McNally, CEO, CloudSphere. “The market has made it clear that the cloud is the path forward, but there remains a clear need for comprehensive cloud governance. Combining these two innovative companies significantly accelerates the path for us to build the governance solutions needed to support this market transformation.”
“Early on we recognized the common vision of our two companies, and the natural alignment of the product lines extended across our entire portfolio,” said Manoj Nair, HyperGrid founder and CloudSphere board’s director. “HyperGrid was recognized as a visionary in the Cloud Management Platform category and built a unique position combining stand-alone cloud management and cloud security posture management capabilities for cloud governance. The complementary product lines allow CloudSphere to quickly round out a comprehensive cloud governance platform for our customers that delivers a truly differentiated, application-centric approach.”
Combining the capabilities of both companies, CloudSphere has developed a multi-cloud capable Cloud Governance Platform that includes solutions for:
- Cloud Migration Planning
- Reducing migration risk when planning a move to the cloud
- Cloud Cost Management
- Eliminating surprise cloud bills with real-time proactive budget alerting
- Cloud Security Posture Management
- Controlling access sprawl with unique cloud identity and access management
With offices in Los Altos, CA and Dublin, Ireland, CloudSphere serves Fortune 500 customers as well as a obal customer base of MSP’s accelerating digital transformation with an with an intelligent multi-cloud governance framework.
According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, “In the course of this research, several key observations emerged from the providers’ strategies and successful/unsuccessful deployments that should be carefully considered during an organization’s CMP strategy formulation and solution selection. They include a growing demand for using CMP solutions to apply governance that allows the enforcement of cloud service standards where the key areas of governance are around cost management and security.” [1]
The CloudSphere funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge Capital.
“Public cloud adoption has created a number of compelling opportunities for disruptive innovation, and we see a growing need for cloud governance as organizations mature in their use of the cloud.” said Kevin Dillion, managing partner, Atlantic Bridge and executive board chair, CloudSphere. “We are thrilled to partner with CloudSphere to help accelerate their ability to bring application-centric Cloud Governance innovation to the market.”
Also joining the CloudSphere board are Greg Nicastro formerly CPO, CloudHealth, acquired by VMware, and Joe Macri formerly VP, Microsoft Corporation.
[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, Dennis Smith, Sanjit Ganguli, Padraig Byrne, February 13, 2020
Comments
CloudSphere is the result of multiple iterations of GridStore with additions of other companies in the meantime.
GridStore was founded in 2009 and raised $44.5 million in 4 rounds to provide a scale-out NAS for SMB based on Windows OS. It was the original mission and interesting project. Time was tough as the company never found its landing zone.
Around 2015, the team tried a new positioning in the HCI segment as the new hot and hope zone for many vendors. But it never took off. The product, named HCA for HyperConverged Appliance, combines Windows 2012 R2, the GridStore vController, some hardware and run as a VM in Microsoft Hyper-V.
But again, this strategy hit a wall and the project evolved, once again, into a new direction.
In May 2016, HyperGrid was born as the result of the merger between GrisStore and DCHQ. In fact, DCHQ was absorbed by GridStore in that process. HyperGrid changed again to offer HCI-as-a-Service with its product named HyperCloud.
The story continued again, the company suffered from "HyperConfidentiality" instead of reaching the HyperConverged segment and guess what, a few weeks ago, a new merger happened.
CloudSphere was born as the result of the addition of HyperGrid and iQuate. What a story!
By the way, Manoj Nair, HyperGrid founder, is now general manager of Metallic, the SaaS backup business of Commvault. He left HyperGrid at the birth of CloudSphere but he's still a board member.
This journey reminds another long story with many iterations... Overland.
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