While some perceive OpenStack as a threat to traditional management paradigms, Platform9 Inc. sees an opportunity to combine old and new in order to provide organizations with the best of both worlds. And it now has $10 million in additional funding to pursue that goal courtesy of Menlo Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

The capital will go towards widening the adoption of its namesake OpenStack distribution, which promises many of the same benefits as its more conventional alternatives: automation, centralized monitoring and the works. The difference is that Platform9 is not relying solely on the open-source to deliver that functionality.

Its founders, veterans of VMware Inc., came up with the idea of adding support for their old firm’s hugely-popular virtualization management software – the arguably biggest target in the sights of its fellow OpenStack distributors – to the Platform9 architecture. That kills two birds with one stone, allowing customers to tap existing talent and thus avoid the need to expend precious resources on training staff in using the platform while taking advantage of existing software investments.

The combination of the two acts to significantly lower the barrier entry for the everyday enterprises that could stand to benefit tremendously from the potential economies of OpenStack but lack the means to set it up on their own. Further simplifying the implementation is the homegrown management functionality Platform9 has bundled into its distro.

Customers don’t install the platform itself but rather an agent that scans the underlying hardware and automatically deploys OpenStack in the most appropriate manner, which the startup says reduces the installation process to a few short minutes. From there onwards, Platform9 transmits metadata about the deployment to a backend monitoring service that alerts the on-premise administrators of any operational issues gleaned from those logs.

The new funding will be used to extend that value proposition to other virtualization platforms beyond VMware’s, namely Docker, support for which is due to arrive later this year. Menlo Ventures general partner Mark Siegel is joining the startup’s board as part of the investment, which brings its total raised to $14.5 million.

Photo via Platform9