CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud service management provider, has announced a $46 million (£35.8m) series D funding round with the company all set to go public.

The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Meritech Capital Partners, and existing investors .406 Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners, taking overall funding to $86m across four rounds.

The company provides a platform that sits on top of other cloud tools, enabling organisations to better understand their cloud costs, whether it is by department, team, application, or business group, and allocate accordingly. Customers include Pinterest, Dow Jones and Imgur.

CloudHealth is clear in its position that the next step from here is towards IPO, although writing in a company blog post, CEO and co-founder Dan Phillips explains how the path to going public is ‘rarely a straight line’.

“Not only are we looking to be part of that elite club [of public Boston technology software companies], but we are also looking to capitalise on a unique set of market conditions and opportunities that have unfolded with the advent of cloud computing,” Phillips wrote.

“Not many companies have the opportunity to be the leader in a disruptive market with exponential growth and become the anchor company at the centre of the Boston software technology ecosystem for decades to come.”

Earlier this year, a report from Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), affirmed that IPOs in the cloud space were drying up, although this was offset by M&A activity going through the roof. Only five companies – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge, and Twilio – went public last year, with this year seeing Cloudera, MuleSoft and Okta all take the plunge.  

Could 2018’s first name be provisionally pencilled in therefore? Phillips told CloudTech in a statement that there was ‘no definitive timetable’ at the moment but noted the IPO market ‘is showing some positive signs, so it’s something we’ll continue to watch’.

“At this point we’re focusing more on hitting our short-term goals – continuing to capitalise on the market opportunity we have ahead of us,” he said. “Right now, we’re focusing on scaling our business in every way – expanding our product line, our geographical footprint, our partner portfolio and our talent base. This latest round of funding gives us the ability to continue to execute on our plans.”

«Our strategy is to focus on the hyperscale providers – AWS, Azure, and Google. Over the last year we saw that a lot of developers need to learn how to do their job in the cloud and we see this DevOps movement that we are catering to with our content,» stated Alessandro Fasan, Head of Global Sales at Cloud Academy, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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The cloud ushered in a fundamental change in the way applications are deployed. Instead of worrying about how much dedicated hardware to order for your data center, you simply spin up as many servers as you need to do the job, then decommission them once the job is done. Yet, you still have to plan how many servers you will need at each stage of processing; you still have to remember to decommission them when done; and you pay for the entire virtual machine during the time you use it even though the server may be idle for most of that time.

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Box and Microsoft have announced an expansion to their partnership – with machine learning as part of the potential benefits.

The two companies will align on sales efforts – co-selling Box with Azure, for instance – with the former using the latter as a ‘strategic public cloud platform’.

Yet it is the machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) aspect which leapt out most. The references in the press materials were all shrouded in modal verbs like ‘might’ and ‘could’, but video indexing – using natural language processing to generate metadata and power advanced search – was referenced.

“From leveraging Azure’s footprint of 40 data centres worldwide to help customers keep their data stored in-region, to taking advantage of Azure’s AI technologies – like video recognition – we’re incredibly thrilled to be exploring other innovations for customers,” wrote Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, in a company blog post. “We’ll be working with Microsoft to jointly deliver these solutions, and more, to customers over the coming quarters.”

The initial reference was to Box Zones, a product launched last year which enables in-region data storage, which is currently available in eight countries. Yet as the release puts it, “over time Box intends to leverage Azure’s global footprint to expand Box Zones coverage to many more regions while also giving customers choice and flexibility in local storage options.”

Earlier this month, Box launched Box Drive, which aims to combine “infinite access to the cloud with an intuitive, natively integrated desktop experience that is familiar to hundreds of millions of people today in enterprises all over the world.”

SYS-CON Events announced today that SourceForge has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SourceForge is the largest, most trusted destination for Open Source Software development, collaboration, discovery and download on the web serving over 32 million viewers, 150 million downloads and over 460,000 active development projects each and every month.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Silicon India has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Published in Silicon Valley, Silicon India magazine is the premiere platform for CIOs to discuss their innovative enterprise solutions and allows IT vendors to learn about new solutions that can help grow their business.

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Trust is a fickle thing, and making the leap to fully trust someone or something isn’t always easy, especially in new or unfamiliar circumstances. Take for example hybrid IT, where new cloud-based IT infrastructure has introduced a level of uncertainty, or at least less-proven technologies and processes, for IT professionals.
In fact, the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017: Portrait of a Hybrid IT Organization explored this notion of trust in the hybrid IT era, particularly as it pertains to the IT professional and cloud services provider (CSP) relationship. The survey found that on the spectrum of trust, the majority of IT professionals (62 percent) say they only somewhat trust CSPs. To contextualize this, SolarWinds also polled its THWACK® online community of IT professionals and found where exactly CSPs fall in the trust spectrum:

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Cloud applications are seeing a deluge of requests to support the exploding advanced analytics market. “Open analytics” is the emerging strategy to deliver that data through an open data access layer, in the cloud, to be directly consumed by external analytics tools and popular programming languages. An increasing number of data engineers and data scientists use a variety of platforms and advanced analytics languages such as SAS, R, Python and Java, as well as frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark. Cloud APIs are commonly designed to support application integration representing a disconnect with the analytics ecosystem. These combined trends create significant demand for a “bring-your-own-analytics” (BYOA) capability for cloud applications.

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In this presentation, Striim CTO and founder Steve Wilkes will discuss practical strategies for counteracting fraud and cyberattacks by leveraging real-time streaming analytics. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Steve Wilkes, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Striim, will provide a detailed look into leveraging streaming data management to correlate events in real time, and identify potential breaches across IoT and non-IoT systems throughout the enterprise. Strategies for processing massive amounts of data and performing complex analysis – including anomaly detection and pattern matching – at lightning speed will be shared.

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