Cloudscaling is this morning announcing that it has secured $10M by way of a Series B venture round. This news comes at a super interesting time when public cloud provision is being heavily squeezed into just a handful of vendors. At the same time every man and his dog is looking towards building and running private clouds – from the usual suspects (Dell, HP etc) through to players like Rackspace who recently announced an initiative to build and run OpenStack powered clouds for other service providers. Cloudscaling is well known within the industry – in part because Randy Bias, co-founder and CTO of the company is a fairly outspoken individual who always seems to be at the cutting edge of cloud discussions – see below for the “State of the Stack” talk he gave at the OpenStack summit a couple of months ago. The company’s core product, Open Cloud System (OCS), is an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system that is designed to deliver the economic benefits of cloud, but to be deployable in the customer’s data center and under the IT team’s control.

At the OpenStack summit Cloudscaling announced the latest version of its product and also signaled a partnership with Juniper to integrate that company’s virtual network control (VNC) technology into OCS. It’s a logical step, Juniper gets to be an integral part of a logical and compelling cloud OS, while Cloudscaling gets a big dose of credibility with larger organizations. Cloudscaling also announced that it was joining Seagate’s Cloud Builder program, and was looking at developing an optimized storage solution for OpenStack powered clouds. The round included previous investor Trinity Ventures and, not surprisingly given the existing partnership arrangements, also included Juniper and Seagate.

Since time immemorial (or at least for a number of years) a bit of an inside joke amongst the cloud cognoscenti has been the fact that almost every vendor under the sun uses Korea Telecom (KT) as a case study for its technology. KT has seemingly done a PoC trial with every vendor out there and, frankly, the general consensus is that any vendor who is still using KT as a proof point is missing something. Cloudscaling has been guilty, in the past, of talking up KT as a customer but has now secured a bunch of extra successful customers including LivingSocial, EVault, Ubisoft and DataFort.

These customer wins, the new found industry focus on private and special use-case clouds and the not insignificant wins Cloudscaling has had in recent months bode well for the company’s future.

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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