Cloudyn, a cloud administrative service that helps companies monitor and optimize cloud utilization and cost across different infrastructure providers, announced today it had received $4M in Series A funding led by Titanium Investments with additional funding from existing investor RDSeed.
The funding brings the total amount raised to date to $5.5M. As a condition of the deal, Alexander Aivazov, Managing Partner of Titanium Investments will get a seat on the Cloudyn board of directors.
Cloudyn is part of a growing group of services designed to support and administer the use of cloud resources. In the case of Cloudyn says CEO Sharon Wagner, “We provide monitoring for cost, usage and performance across different cloud vendors, whether public or private.” That could mean monitoring pricing across services, recommending the right cloud configuration for each one and optimizing resource allocation across services.
“We will recommend increasing size of instances to increase performance and recommend consolidation of similar resources,” Wagner said. He added that, you can always pay for additional performance, but customers are looking for that optimal point between cost and performance.
Ideally that would mean Cloudyn would give you visibility across your different cloud instances wherever they lived to help you find that balance. For now, Cloudyn supports Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and OpenStack, but Wagner says the company intends to use part of the funding to expand support to other popular cloud platforms, particularly Microsoft Azure and VMware.
Wagner said he is seeing increased demand from customers for both of these platforms and they needed funding to build the support into the platform. “Customers want a more holistic view of cloud optimizations, not just Amazon, Google and OpenStack we support today,” Wagner explained.
Wagner said, Cloudyn also wants to provide additional ways of measuring performance moving forward, helping to find ways to connect cloud performance metrics to business revenue. If companies can maximize use of their cloud services and run more efficiently, it stands to reason they could tie that to lower operational costs and potentially increased revenue.
As I wrote in May, services like Cloudyn are part of an expanding ecosystem of cloud services driven by open APIs. Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, quoted in the May article, saw this growth as a natural progression as we move to a new way of computing and labeled the general category “Data Center as a Service.”
These new applications are designed to help  IT pros deal with administering the growth of cloud infrastructure services inside organizations. Typically these cloud services live side by side with on premises ones and a service like Cloudyn helps companies administer the two worlds and maximize their investments across them.
Wagner said the company, which is based in Israel, wants to build out the customer support and success part of the business by opening and staffing a support office in the U.S.somewhere in Silicon Valley. Today, 80 percent of Cloudyn’s customers are in the U.S.
The company received $1.5M in seed funding in September, 2011 and has built the company to 17 people, mostly engineers. It claims 2,400 customers to date.
PHOTO CREDIT: (c) Can Stock Photo
