News yesterday that cloud governance and management vendor enStratus (more on them here) has raised a cool $4.5M in a funding round that includes El Dorado ventures. The SEC filing is for an initial $3.5M but reliable sources tell me the balance of $1M is going to come soon.

The news comes in the same week that enStratus gained a couple of highly respected Cloud folks, and proud clouderati members, James Urquhart and John Willis.

A few weeks ago I joined George Reese from enStratus for a deep dive into both their strategy and their product functional spread – both now and in the roadmap. I’ve talked to a lot of vendors in this cloud management space and I have to say that I came away from the enStratus briefing highly impressed by what I saw which leads me to concur with what Krish suggests, and independent sources have confirmed, that a number of customers are using enStratus to fill gaps in the Cloud.com product recently acquired by Citrix. I’ve also had multiple reports from people that Citrix is closely looking at enSTratus and that in fact this funding round may in face precede a takeover of enStratus by Citrix.

Whether or not Citrix snaps them up – I’m picking a pretty rapid exit for enStratus – and given all that Reese has done for the cloud community, that would be well deserved.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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