Despite the intense competition in the cloud market, several top investors are betting that a relatively small player called Skytap Inc. will secure a slice of the pie.

The Seattle-based company today announced that it has closed a $45 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The investment is meant to help widen the adoption of Skytap’s public cloud, which stands out from market leaders such as Amazon Web Services Inc. by specifically targeting on-premise applications.

Moving a legacy workload to AWS or one of the other top platforms usually requires extensive code modifications. In many cases, the process takes months. Skytap can streamline the task by mirroring the on-premises infrastructure from which an application is imported to create an almost identical cloud-based copy.

According to the provider, the original environment is replicated down to the network settings. That’s made possible by the fact that Skytap Cloud supports many of the technologies found in a traditional data center, from popular virtualization tools to various middleware suits. It’s also the only infrastructure as a service platform that works with IBM Corp.’s AIX operating system.

But that doesn’t mean Skytap is limiting its focus to legacy workloads. The company said the platform can also run new applications built from the ground up to be deployed in the cloud, which gives organizations the power to replace the dated components of their environments over time.

Rounding out Skytap Cloud is an extensive set of management options designed to ease day-to-day operations. Among the platform’s most distinguishing features is the ability to save the configuration of a deployment into a template for reuse. A company could, for example, create a copy of its environment before rolling out a big update to test that the changes have the intended effect.  

Skytap boasts big-name clients such as NBCUniversal, Dell Technologies Inc. and GE Healthcare. The provider claims to have seen its average contract size increase over 50 percent over the past year thanks to strong demand among large enterprises.

Image: Skytap