Nebula Promises Secures Big Investment Dollars
OpenStack is making news again, and this time is for something more than the competition with CloudStack. Nebula, a start up founded in 2011, is betting that its vision of a “plug-and-play” enterprise class OpenStack cloud will appeal to customers that have don’t have the desire or expertise to customize the technology. Investors agree, and have shown their support with millions of dollars. Nebula has secured an impressive $25 million in its second round of funding.
Comcast Ventures led the Series B round, but another set of names on the list of investors are attracting the most attention -Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram – Google’s first investors. The number of OpenStack solutions is exploding, but Nebula believes they have something special. CEO Chris Kemp explained,
“We provide a device that they can plug their services into and, boom, they’re going. Some of the other OpenStack clouds — such as those from Red Hat or Canonical will be more suited to hard-core techies that want to customize their clouds.”
Nebula is attracting big dollars, but it still has a lean staff of 60. The company will use some of the new funding to augment its workforce with more engineering, management and sales talent. In addition, it plans to expand the private beta it launched in March.
It isn’t just money Nebula’s attracting. At the end of July, seven developers defected from Rackspace, which happens to be the co-creator of OpenStack, to join Nebula. The loss of talent isn’t slowing Rackspace. Last month it bought out Mailgun , a team that developed an email integration tool for OpenStack, and ultimately, Rackspace (and NASA) spawned the entire OpenStack market, which contains Nebula.
The cloud market, the open source cloud market and even the OpenStack market is still heavily fragmented. Companies are emerging in parallel with the technology, and the pace of evolution is almost explosive. Although the environment is frustrating for organizations attempting to select the right technology strategy, it’s an opportunity for lean new comers like Nebula to stake their claim right along side the tried and true giants and have the same chance at success.
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