Cloudyn Looks To Support VMware, Azure With Expansion Plan

New Series A funding should help grease plans by Cloudyn to broaden the base of cloud platforms it supports and eventually open what will likely be a West Coast office for the company.

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Cloudyn, which was named an emerging cloud vendor by CRN this year, provides a cloud-based solution that it says helps its customers monitor and optimize their cloud resources.

The company said Monday it landed $4 million in a round led by Titanium Investments, along with RDSeed, that brings its total raised to $5.5 million.

[Related: Emerging Vendors 2014: Cloud Vendors]

"I think that the funding reflects strong adoption of our product and came at the right time to help us grow significantly," Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner told CRN in an interview last week.

Proceeds from the round will go toward improvements to the technology and expanding support with new cloud platforms, he added.

Cloudyn's software currently supports Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and OpenStack.

The company counts more than 2,400 customers, mostly in North America and the Asia-Pacific region, which include companies in the aerospace and online travel industries, among others.

"Definitely, our unique proposition is in hybrid clouds," Wagner said. "We have a significant number of clients requesting Microsoft Azure and VMware. That's going to be the next two cloud vendors we will support."

This is part of a strategy to grow the company's clients, with an emphasis on North America and the EMEA regions. Wagner was unable to provide timing on the Azure and VMware additions, but said it's "yet to be determined, and we are actively working on these two."

Cloudyn currently has an employee count of 17, mostly in engineering. The company has plans to eventually open an office in the U.S., which Wagner said likely will be on the West Coast. He couldn't provide an exact date, but said, "I expect it to be soon."

Wagner said the company works with dozens of channel partners, most of which are in North America, and categorized in three categories: cloud vendors, system integrators and technology companies in the cloud management space.

One of those partners is London-based Strategic Blue, whose CEO James Mitchell met Wagner in late 2012 when the two participated on a panel together. Strategic Blue, a cloud broker-dealer with some sales and marketing partners in Texas, sells a service called Cloud Options.

One of Cloud Options' larger customers wanted to be able to send alerts to their finance team any time their AWS spending surpassed certain thresholds, Mitchell explained to CRN. And the customer wanted to be able to monitor that with a non-AWS tool, and that's where Cloudyn came in.

"Cloudyn had capabilities that really surpassed our expectations, as they had various different versions of their offering, and we were able to choose the one that fitted us best as a channel," Mitchell said. "Accurately billing individual AWS users is actually very complicated for any AWS reseller, and Cloudyn allowed us to independently check our own system's calculations for the first time."

Cloudyn doesn't disclose financial information, but Wagner said revenue has doubled for six straight quarters.

"We see a very strong trend among enterprises to adopt cloud computing … and as part of this trend, we see stronger adoption of our technology among enterprises," he said.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 15, 2014