Nimbula, one of the LaunchPad finalists in this year’s Structure conference, today said that it has secured $ 15 million in funding from Accel Partners. The funding is set to continue Nimbula’s investment in hybrid cloud computing technologies but also to fund sales and marketing efforts in order to gain greater market adoption.
Founded by the team that developed Amazon EC2, Nimbula delivers a cloud operating system that combines the scalability and operational efficiency that we’ve grown accustomed to with the public cloud, but with the control that enterprises require for within their own data centers.
While many commentators are scornful about private clouds, claiming that the concept doesn’t meet their test for “the true cloud,” more moderate commentators, myself included, would contend that so long as it’s scalable and abstracts management away from the user, it constitutes a cloud product.
What separates Nimbula from the myriad of private cloud companies, however, is the pedigree of its executive team. Nimbula was founded by Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, the execs who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service. These high-profile founders have attracted high-profile VCs to boot: Accel funded such big names as AdMob, Facebook and ComScore while Sequoia Capital, an existing investor that also took part in this round, backed big names Yahoo, Google and YouTube.
Nimbula’s product, Director, seeks to manage both on-premise and off-premise resources. Director is a cloud operating system that is designed for scalability, ease of use, flexibility, reliability, and security, as well as:
- Installs on bare metal
- Allows for a heterogeneous configuration
- Provides an automated control panel
- Is reliable and distributed
- Needs minimal configuration
- Includes dynamic Resource Discovery
The size of this funding round, and the pedigree of the backers, should be taken as a real vote of confidence in Nimbula’s ability to execute on this space.
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Ben Kepes is an independent consultant and contributing writer for GigaOM. Please see his disclosure statement in his bio.
