CloudVelocity is a provider of software that enables new and existing Linux and Windows multi-tier applications to run in the cloud without modification. Headquartered in Santa Clara, the company recently raised $5 million in series-A funding from Mayfield Fund.

The business case for enterprises to develop their own data centers is rapidly eroding. Many are opting for third party facilities and cloud operating models, yet there are serious shortcomings which prevent enterprises from taking full advantage of the transformative power of public clouds. Running existing applications in a public cloud is hard: today's multi-tier applications span multiple hosts and are comprised of not only application binaries and data, but also libraries, operating system services, data servers and other network services residing in the enterprise. Today it requires extensive manual configuration, provisioning, and a series of complicated and time consuming processes. The result is a costly, risky and slow approach to orchestrating workloads and services between data centers and clouds, impeding the business case for public clouds for most enterprises. So adoption of public cloud by enterprises has been tepid at best.

We decided to tackle this problem at CloudVelocity. The CloudVelocity platform decouples enterprises from today's public and private cloud restrictions and enables the ability to treat multiple clouds and data centers as a single, dynamic pool of resources.

Advantages of a Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud is a hot trend, because it establishes a credible and powerful operating model for the enterprise adoption of public clouds. It combines the agility payoff of public cloud and combines it with the control that enterprise IT expects to have in its own data center. It is the future of enterprise cloud computing because it enables IT to operate at an even higher level of productivity and economy.

Hybrid cloud will also enable a new generation of solutions that will be far superior to their hardware and premise-bound predecessors, including cloud migration and integration, cloud cloning, cloud failover and cloud bursting. All of these solutions will be a leap ahead of the solutions in use today. They offer more agility and economy with higher potentials for availability, and with fewer trade-offs and compromises now commonplace.

There will be increasing agility pressures on enterprise IT and the need for hybrid cloud operating models will become table stakes for all enterprise IT departments. Service providers will be required to cater to this requirement in order to win significant portions of the enterprise cloud business.

Lines between SME and Enterprise Markets are Blurred

This is a great time to be an entrepreneur as these hybrid cloud platforms will fuel entirely new opportunities for growth. This coming era won't be easy, but it will be easier to start a tech venture and obtain growth on a more level playing field. Service will be a key requirement, and both marketing and operations will play a more strategic role in success as the lines between SME and enterprise markets are blurred by the rise of hybrid clouds.