I vaguely remember some time a year or so ago when VC funding of companies slowed down a little. It seems that little dip has well and truly passed – every week I’m receiving many email detailing another funding round. This morning it was the turn of StorSimple, now AdaptiveComputing is announcing a series A round.
I’ve written about AdaptiveComputing before, they join a number of companies in the “automating public clouds” space. When I wrote about them previously I was a little pessimistic saying that:
I’m not convinced this is a safe strategy for differentiation, especially since Microsoft Azure looks to be filling this alleged gap. Automation tools like this often become a component of other products, as we saw with the Layerboom acquisition. Adaptive Computing’s strategy seems to rely on being the most-used automation solution for both IBM and HP in cases where customers request a product with a fuller feature set than those vendor’s own offerings. This seems to be aimed at eventual acquisition — a risky move given the small number of potential suitors in the market.
It would seem that a number of investors, most notably Intel Capital disagree. They, along with Tudor Ventures and EPIC ventures re pumping $14 million into Adaptive Computing, hoping to ride the growing wave that is private and hybrid clouds.
I’ll not re-litigate the public versus private cloud debate, but I will say that a huge number of organizations seem to be considering a hybrid or private cloud strategy as an ideal entry point into cloud computing, Adaptive computing and other vendors like it are acing to become the defacto tool for management of this infrastructure.
I spoke with Adaptive Computing COO and President Michael Jackson about the deal, he was very bullish, pointing out that Adaptive is an existing business with and existing product offering and revenue base, and that this head start differentialte themselves from their competition.
The funding round, Jackson reports, will be used to ramp up professional services and pre-sales to “meet the growing global demand for the product”.
