Weekly cloud review: fresh funding + new services steal spotlight
Just when it seemed that the cloud ecosystem is beginning to settle down, with Amazon staking the lead, DigitalOcean landed $37.2 million in Series A funding from prominent Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz. The Seattle-based startup has done what the industry’s largest vendors have failed and gained a one-up on the cloud giant, outpacing it as the world’s fastest growing provider.
The company increased the number of web-facing computers to its name by 6,514 in December 2013, according to NetGear, while Amazon added only 6,269. DigitalOcean co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky said that his firm will use the new capital to build out new infrastructure, further accelerating growth, and hire “top-tier engineers” in order to address popular feature requests.
Meanwhile, an equally ambitious cloud startup called CloudBees is going straight for the enterprise with an IaaS for building and testing Java-based applications. The service is among the few on the market to provide full support for the Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) solution, and gives users the freedom to move their workloads to other cloud platforms without jumping through hoops..
CloudBees announced on Wednesday that it has raised $11.2 million in Series C financing led by the investment arm of Verizon, with which it partnered earlier this year. New investor Blue Cloud Ventures and existing backers Matrix Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners also participated in the round, which brings the total raised to nearly $26 million.
While the startup crowd is working to dethrone Amazon, Microsoft is pursuing a more strategic approach towards cloud dominance. The software titan this week introduced OneDrive for Business, a standalone service that features all the capabilities of the standard version plus simplified compliance and a ““strong set of enterprise-ready administrative controls.”
photo: ~Matt LightJam {Mattia Merlo} via photopin cc
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