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Cloud management provider CliQr Technologies on April 7 landed a cool $20 million in Series C funding led by Polaris Partners, which includes investments from Foundation Capital, Google Ventures and TransLink Capital.
CliQr, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. with development support in Bangalore, India, has a cloud application management platform that enables enterprises to run and secure apps inside public, private or hybrid cloud systems. Most of its work, however, is in hybrids — the trendiest clouds there are right now.
“We’ll be using it (the $20 million) for growing our growth, and a lot of our customers are large global enterprises, so we’ll also be using it for supporting them,” CEO and co-founder Gaurav Manglik told eWEEK.
Five-year-old CliQr has received a total of $38.1 million in three rounds from four investors, the company said.
Handles All Cloud Management in One Package
CliQr’s secret sauce is that it can enable businesses to efficiently migrate, govern and manage one-to-many applications, users, and clouds. The company’s application-centric IT de-couples applications from the complexity of hybrid cloud environments, allowing them to be fluidly moved and managed to and between any cloud.
A lot of the trends that CliQr saw in the markets a few years ago are now coming true, CMO Dave Cope told eWEEK.
“Our two co-founders, Tenry Fu and Gaurav Manglik, worked together at VMware, where they developed most of the hybrid cloud management platforms you see in the marketplace today. Their observation back then was that for cloud to really take off, it had to be hybrid,” Cope said.
“As cloud became more mature, people started to realize that there are different best-execution venues for workloads. To support these hybrid environments, made up of physical, public and private clouds, there had to be a way to decouple applications from the diversity behind all this different infrastructure. That was the genesis behind CliQr.”
Hybrids Are Being Built More Frequently
When cloud was in early stage, this all sounded cool, Cope said, “but people were still trying to figure out what cloud was all about — was it about private or public, or which public is better. Today, whether a user has a small number (of nodes) or a large number, it’s all about hybrid. One of our big media customers is managing seven public and private clouds in 25 regions around the world. Whether you’re at early or late stage hybrid cloud, that, in fact, is the way the cloud is going.”
Most of CliQr’s customers now have the desire to run IT as a service, in that they want to run a federation of clouds, apps and users on a single platform. “That by far is the most popular use case we’re seeing today,” Cope said.
One customer, NTT, runs one of the largest enterprise clouds in the world.
“What NTT has done is created a ‘cloud of clouds,’ ” Cope said. “They run a large number of businesses around the world. They have a services portal, where a customer can come to this convenient portal, rapidly on-board their application, benchmark it across all their (NTT) properties, determine the best execution venue, deploy it, manage it, and set it into their corporate governance policies.”
CliQr enables that entire scenario. “We see a lot of that across the service provider community,” Cope said.