VMware veterans launch 100% Cloud Managed Platform for Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere

Platform9 has also announced $4.5 million in Series A funding from Redpoint Ventures. Advisors include Meraki Founder Hans Robertson, Former VMware Exec Bogomil Balkansky and Caroline McCrory.

"Platform9's big innovation is that it brings the best of the public cloud to our existing infrastructure," said Gopal Koratana, CTO of Vendormate, who serves 2,000 healthcare providers and 68,000 vendor companies.

IT leaders of today 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."

"Having worked with the Platform9 team over the last 6 months, I can tell you their vision is spot on when it comes to knowing what customers need to make a jump to their own private cloud successful," said Mark Schliemann, VP of Technical Operations at Moz, a leader in marketing analytics.

Platform9 is the easiest way for enterprises to implement a private cloud, with intelligent, self-service provisioning of workloads onto their computing infrastructure.
· 100% Cloud Managed: Platform9's cloud-based model means that there is no complex management software to setup, monitor and upgrade, thus simplifying the operational experience.
· Single Pane of Glass: Platform9 offers unified management across diverse environments - Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere - across datacenters and geographies.
· Based on OpenStack: Platform9 customers get the best of OpenStack with 100% API compatibility.
How IT Benefits
· Non-Disruptive Setup and Upgrades: Administrators can import their existing servers and workloads non-disruptively within minutes. Upgrades are as easy as clicking a button in the User Interface and letting Platform9 do the rest.
· Richer Visibility: Platform9 dashboards provide rich visibility and insight into an organization's private cloud, across infrastructure, workloads and users. Platform9 works across datacenters and geographies, eliminating management silos.
· Automation and Policy Control: Platform9 pools together servers, storage and networking into a private cloud that can be shared by teams of users. Platform9's intelligent placement technology ensures optimal hardware utilization, enforces capacity quotas and enables administrators to express rich policies for tiered consumption of resources.
· Support for Diversity: Platform9 lets administrators mix and match Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere seamlessly, enabling them to choose the best virtualization or container technologies for their applications.

How Developers Benefit
· Self-Service Access: Developers get UI and API based self-service access to their private cloud. They can rapidly provision and access instances without waiting on human intervention. Developers can easily automate their build/test/release pipeline by leveraging OpenStack APIs or libraries.
· Support for Collaboration: Platform9 makes collaboration between team members and across different teams easy and intuitive with native support for creation of shared environments to rapidly provision and destroy instances. This enables faster resolution of problems between development and QA teams.