Category Archives: SAP Ventures

Alex Freedland, August Capital, Diane Bryant, Ericsson, Funding, Insight Venture Partners, Intel, Mirantis, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, SAP Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, WestSummit Capital.

Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has secured $100m in new funding this week in a round led by Intel Capital, with the companies also announcing deepened collaboration in the cloud arena.

The latest round, which comes less than a year after Mirantis secured $100m in series B funds from investors, also included participation from new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said the cash will be used to bolster its partnerships with vendors and other organisations innovating with OpenStack.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Mirantis’ goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions,” said Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis.

“Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 per cent committed to only OpenStack,” Freedland said.

At the same time, Intel and Mirantis announced the two companies would deepen their partnership and work together on Intel’s Clouds for All initiative, a series of partnerships with ISVs announced earlier this summer which are intended to accelerate cloud interoperability and boost deployments.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds,” Bryant said.

API, Apigee, BlackRock, Funding, News & Analysis, Norwest Ventures, Platform as a service, SAP Ventures

API and cloud app specialist Apigee to go public

Apigee helps enterprises re-architect their apps to make them suitable for cloud, big data and IoT

Apigee helps enterprises re-architect their apps to make them suitable for cloud, big data and IoT

Apigee, an API software platform provider that helps enterprises build and scale apps, is the latest cloud provider to propose an initial public offering of shares of its common stock.

The firm, backed by notable technology investment firms including BlackRock, SAP Ventures and Norwest Ventures, has enlisted Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Securities to help manage the process of going public.

The company hopes to raise a modest $87m through the IPO according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

While Apigee claims some of the most reputable firms in the world as customers (eBay, the BBC, Orange, Equinix) and secured close to $200m in seven funding rounds since it was founded in 2004, the company’s financials raise some questions about the company’s viability in the long term.

Like Box, the pure-play cloud storage and collaboration provider that also recently went public (raising over three times when Apigee is seeking), the company has accrued a notable amount of debt compared with what it intends to raise through the IPO.

The company’s gross billings were $36.7m, $43.1m and $63.8m in fiscal 2012, 2013 and 2014, respectively. But it incurred net losses of $8.3m, $25.9m and $60.8m in 2012, 2013 and 2014, respectively. It racked up losses of $26.8m in the six months ended January 31, 2015.

Nevertheless, it’s clear enterprise app development is becoming API-centric, as an increasing number of IT services are being joined up.

“We believe that application programming interfaces, or APIs, are a critical enabling technology for the shifts in mobile, cloud computing, big data and the IoT and that APIs are a foundational technology on which digital business operates. We believe that a new and expansive market opportunity exists to help enterprises adopt digital strategies and navigate the digitally driven economy,” the company said in its SEC S-1 filing.

“Today, it is difficult for many businesses to fully participate and innovate in the digital world because traditional enterprise software is not designed to interact with and connect to the rapidly evolving digital economy. The IT architectures deployed at most businesses are based on thousands of application servers communicating with databases, other applications and numerous middleware layers, each using thousands of custom integrations and connectors. These legacy architectures generally cannot publish APIs in a way that can be used by application developers.”