So, your IT infrastructure is complex – that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult to manage. StrataCloud provides a unified infrastructure management solution for virtual, converged and cloud environments. It simplifies and automates management allowing you to make intelligent, validated decisions that speed deployment, optimize performance, right-size capacity and increase IT productivity.
We recently caught up with Heather Foster to hear a bit more of the StrataCloud story.
Year/Date Founded?
2010
Number of Employees?
25
Founders/Execs?
Brian Cohen (CEO), Aaron Bawcom (CTO), Preston Futrell (VP of Direct Sales), Mike Wronski (VP of Systems Engineering and Customer Success), Heather Foster (VP of Marketing), Steve Cundill (VP of Channel Sales and Alliances)
Funding or bootstrapped?
Funded with $2M equity investment in 2014
Are you currently looking for additional funding? If so, what for?
We will be seeking additional growth capital in 2015. Primarily for growth in sales, marketing, partner development, and R&D.
How’d You Get The Idea For It?
As a provider of virtualization management software, we’ve watched our customers’ needs evolve. And as virtualization has become a common technique for optimizing compute cycles in the data center, a new trend has emerged toward software-based IT management. This is often referred to as the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The concept of SDDC allows use of multi-purpose hardware to fulfill application and user specific requirements, dynamically provisioning components of the data center for each application workload on demand. The concept is compelling, but management platforms for SDDC are extremely immature, limiting the ability to realize SDDC’s full potential. We saw an opportunity and devised a platform from which organizations can effectively manage their infrastructure by defining their application’s requirements and then dynamically provisioning the infrastructure to support them. This platform will allow organizations to realize the full potential of SDDC.
Revenue Model (what does your potential VMware customer base look like)?
Our revenue model is based on both perpetual and term-based software licenses.
How are you different from other competitors?
What really makes our solution different is that StrataCloud offers the unique benefits of:
- Data-driven, Unified Architecture – StrataCloud’s solution is built upon a data-centric architecture that provides the most granular and accurate visibility into what’s happening across all the components of a customer’s infrastructure so it can be managed it in a unified way.
- Situational Intelligence – StrataCloud intuitively understands how a customer’s complex IT infrastructure operates as a system. It analyzes and prioritizes data within the context of a customer’s unique IT and business requirements so they can intelligently manage their infrastructure to service-level demands.
- Adaptive Automation – StrataCloud does more than just analyze and report – it can take action. Our adaptive automation capabilities put our customers in control so they can determine if or when they want the system to take corrective action automatically or when they will use the data-driven, validated recommendations to quickly respond.
How does ATL weave into your story?
The company was founded in Atlanta. Atlanta has an excellent talent pool to draw upon from both a variety of seasoned technology businesses and leading educational institutions.
If you could have one mulligan (do-over) in the process of launching and running this company what would it be?
We would have moved even faster to include channel and alliance partners in our go-to-market strategy.
Is there anything else you need (that money can’t buy)?
We need to ensure that we maintain our passion for innovation and customer success and our commitment to our employees as we grow.
