AI fuels a $4.6T opportunity for service-as-software learn more
March 8, 2016
Ashu Garg
Today we are very excited to announce that ZeroStack is coming out of beta and will be generally available to all customers. ZeroStack has won the hearts and minds of early customers by delivering a private cloud experience that removes the typical obstacles to IT adoption and gets businesses running smarter, faster, and with a cloud of their own in minutes, not months.
ZeroStack’s goal is to be the panacea for the customer who feels stuck on the public cloud and has reached a scale where buying a “real home” makes sense, but where the overhead of maintaining one is just too much. ZeroStack’s approach combines on-premises commodity hardware with an intelligent control system that is delivered as Software-as-a-Service for management and operations. Their unique platform enables customers to develop and run in a high performance, secure environment — with more control and better performance without the need to hire an army of admins or consulting firms.
The key advantage that has propelled ZeroStack to success is their ability to keep a customer’s data within the private cloud, while the control panel operates the cluster from the public one. As a result, ZeroStack is able to offer the same operational management and reporting services that public cloud vendors have pioneered — using machine learning techniques to analyze the event data across infrastructure and predict failures and remediate performance issues in real time.
ZeroStack was born at the Foundation Capital offices back in February of 2014, from the minds of two of our Entrepreneurs in Residence: Ajay Gulati and Kiran Bondalapati. I still have vivid memories of the meeting when it all came together. Ajay and Kiran were feverishly white-boarding their ideas — they had divided the white board into two parts, and were both writing furiously side by side. Kiran was sketching out the pros and cons of using an AWS-like cloud infrastructure while Ajay was scribbling out the benefits and challenges associated with using existing private cloud infrastructure. Coming of out of that discussion was an idea that immediately struck a chord with me, and that idea would eventually become ZeroStack. It has been an incredibly rewarding journey to see them go from that brainstorming session to making the product generally available in less than 2 years.
At Foundation Capital, it’s our belief that tomorrow’s most groundbreaking SaaS companies will be the ones who can pioneer differentiated data sets and apply machine-learning to put those data sets to work in unique ways. These companies will build systems that automate jobs done by humans today, creating entirely new market opportunities. Over time these companies will develop derivative data sets and insights that are proprietary. In some cases, companies will even be able to leverage these data sets and insights to create network effects; something that SaaS companies aspire to do, but rarely achieve. ZeroStack is a great example of such a company. And by aggregating metadata across its customer base, ZeroStack will be able to find patterns that enable it to improve performance, benefitting all of its customers and creating a competitive moat. We believe that every sector of enterprise software will be disrupted by startups that apply machine learning and predictive analytics to increase the value they can deliver to customers at every step.
Please join me in congratulating ZeroStack on their general availability today and learn more at the ZeroStack blog here.