Viewpoint / Enterprise

CloudSimple Acquired By Google Cloud

A Decade Long Partnership with Serial Entrepreneur Guru Pangal Reaches a New Milestone

I first met Guru Pangal over a decade ago, when we invested in his company StorSimple. He along with my partner Ursheet Parikh (co-founder of StorSimple with Guru before joining Mayfield) built a breakout cloud-integrated storage platform, which was acquired by Microsoft and now serves as a foundational element of Azure.

As Guru was thinking about what to do next, Ursheet and I collaborated with him in helping flesh out ideas for his next company. Guru realized that CIOs and enterprise leaders he was meeting all wanted to move to the cloud, but were frustrated by the complexity. The majority of enterprise workloads are platformed on VMware in on-premises data centers. Today, only about 10% of those workloads have moved to the cloud because of the difficulty in rearchitecting applications and changing processes and policies.

One of Guru’s superpowers is in listening to pain points and making the complex simple. He was convinced he could deliver customers a seamless way to move workloads to the cloud; unlocking major benefits like resource elasticity and ease of use with minimal disruption to their existing operations. Being an entrepreneur’s partner we have collaborated with Guru through the ups and downs to realize his vision of building CloudSimple into an operating system to manage dedicated clouds within public clouds. We led their Series A in May 2016, and I have been involved in helping Guru build the company as their BOD member.

Today’s announcement of CloudSimple’s acquisition by Google Cloud marks the latest milestone in our journey, and is a testament to a serial entrepreneur’s ability to create big enterprise value in record time. We have been fortunate to partner with many such breakout serial entrepreneurs including Rehan Jalil/Elastica, Jonah Goodhart/Moat, Phil Fernandez/Marketo, Lyndon Rive/SolarCity, and Jake Winebaum/Brighter.

The CloudSimple platform transforms bare-metal resources in public cloud data centers into “as-a-service” private clouds which can be fast-provisioned in an automated fashion. These private clouds are managed through a single portal, enabling customers to easily access all the public cloud services while benefiting from scalable monitoring, alerting, fault tolerance and 24×7 global support of their private clouds.

The Google Cloud team has a stated commitment to providing enterprise customers a broad suite of solutions to modernize their IT infrastructure. They too had been hearing from customers that they wanted to be able to run what they want, where they want, and how they want—so they can leverage existing investments with as little toil as possible. Therefore, it was an easy decision for CloudSimple to join forces with Google Cloud. As Guru points out – their innovation prowess, modern infrastructure and clear leadership in areas like smart analytics – made Google Cloud a perfect partner.
Please join me in congratulating Guru and the CloudSimple team on building a great platform and looking forward to their exciting new chapter as part of the team at Google Cloud.

Originally published on LinkedIn.

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