More funding news for high-flying Bracket Computing. The company, which is developing pragmatic solutions for the most conservative customer bases, has raised another $45 million.
Let’s get one thing straight. Despite all the hand-waving of public cloud proponents (and, for full disclosure, I’m one who believes that the public cloud will be the default modality for a huge proportion of modern use cases) the fact is that most large companies will embrace a hybrid approach. They’ll have massive use of the public cloud, but they’ll also utilize applications, storage, compute and networking across their own data centers and other service providers.
Bracket Computing aims to make the hybrid approach seamless, the idea being that workloads can be placed where required without concerns about the physical boundaries between infrastructure. Bracket delivers what it calls a “Computing Cell”. Bracket encapsulates an application, along with the data related to that application and any other services related to them. This cell can then move across multiple locations – on-premises or in the cloud, thus allowing organizations to keep a tight handle on costs, service levels, privacy or other constraints that they might have.
Bracket’s CEO Tom Gillis explained the design of the platform. The Bracket Computing Cell uses Amazon’s VPCs & Security Groups, and Google’s Networks & Firewalls (VPCs), as building blocks to extend security for customer applications. To Bracket, Amazon and Google’s VPCs are a cloud provider building block that it can leverage just like the VMs and block & object storage resources it pulls from multiple providers.
“When you have a million servers at your disposal, you have the appearance of an infinite resource,” says Gillis. “Our question to ourselves was: can we build a layer that could present applications with highly reliable and secure performance?”
The company was founded back in 2011, but was in stealth for most of that time. Until this morning, it had raised over $85 million from strategic corporate investors GE and Qualcomm, along with Andreessen Horowitz, Norwest Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, and Allegis Capital. The company is adding to that war chest today with a further $45 million raises in a Series C round. This brings total capital raised to date to $130 million. New investors in the round include Fidelity Management and Research Company and Goldman Sachs, joined by Bracket’s previous investors Allegis Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ARTIS Ventures, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Sutter Hill Ventures, plus strategic investors GE and Qualcomm.
Commenting on the funding, Bracket was very bullish. “Bracket is fundamentally redefining enterprise computing,” said Gillis. “Financial firms need to remain technology leaders, and we’re working with some of the very largest as we define the blueprint for the data center of the future. Our vision is to provide a secure, advanced, virtual infrastructure that spans multiple clouds, both private and public, with one consistent set of capabilities. Having investors of this quality bolsters our efforts to build this ambitious technology.”
According to spokespeople, several large F200 organizations have been able to deploy mission critical IT applications like CRM systems on the public cloud—using Bracket’s Computing Cell.
Bracket is obviously answering a very real requirement, a seamless, wildly heterogeneous infrastructure pool with good operating economies. It’s executive ranks and investor list is a who’s who of technology and all signs indicate that this is a company on its way to some very good things.
