Goldman Sachs has pledged $45 million to a relatively unknown cloud company called Skytap that’s based in Seattle.

With this round, the total funding for Skytap has touched $100 million and it is planning to have its IPO within the next 18 to 24 months, if everything goes according to the management’s plan.

So, what is Skytap and what does it do?

Well, Skytap started off as a project at the University of Washington a few years ago. Over the last few years, it has garnered a niche area of the cloud, which is to help companies to update their old software to keep pace with modern technology.

Earlier on, Skytap understood that it can never compete with companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google simply because it doesn’t have the infrastructure and finance. Instead of working in the shadows of these companies, Skytap decided to carve a niche for itself by addressing an issue that’s not often considered as a mainstream cloud service.

But, in reality, working with legacy systems is a big problem faced by many companies today. When you have legacy systems, it’s difficult to migrate to the cloud, which means, you miss out on the benefits that come with it. To prevent that, Skytap helps companies to update their old software, so they’re in a better position to move their operations to the cloud.

How does Skytap do this?

Essentially, Skytap has a cloud computing platform that behaves like a legacy datacenter to make it easy for enterprises to bring their applications to the cloud. So, when companies move their applications, they can tap into the many benefits of cloud.

That’s not all. You can add or remove computing capacity on this platform, just like how you would on AWS. It even allows you to use software like Docker software containers to help you modernize your existing software.

This unusual idea has helped Skytap to have a growing list of clients that includes big names such as NBC Universal and GE Healthcare. It’s also growing in a big way as is evident from its second-quarter revenue, that was almost three times more than what it earned during the same period last year.

It’s also entered into an agreement with IBM, under which the latter gives Skytap’s technology for its own customers who want to upgrade their legacy systems.

With such an impressive clientele and a growing customer base, it won’t be long before we see Skytap listed on New York’s Stock Exchange.

 

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