[Exclusive Interview] CloudByte Receives USD 2.1 mn Series A funding from Nexus & Kae Capital

CloudByte Inc., announced that it has raised $2.1 million in a Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. Kae Capital also invested as a part of this fund raise. Founded a year ago by a team of senior technology professionals with extensive experience and a background in creating, developing and managing products in cloud storage and security technology areas, CloudByte is a disruptive next generation storage virtualization software product company headquartered in San Mateo, CA, USA with its engineering team based in Bangalore, India.

Srivibhavan Balaram, Founder & CEO, CloudByte, said, “Storage virtualization is far behind server virtualization in terms of delivering security, predictable performance and high utilization in a manageable and cost effective manner. The CloudByte solution bridges this gap by delivering full-functionality storage virtualization so that enterprises and cloud service providers can reap the full benefits of a virtualized data center. The funding will be used to expand sales efforts in the US and Asia markets and for ongoing product development. Nexus has backed successful companies like Cloud.com and Gluster in cloud and storage areas, and we see them as great partners as we create a leader in the storage virtualization space. We also wish to thank Kae capital for trusting our vision and investing in our future.”

“To maximize the benefit they gain from server virtualization, enterprises and service providers are seeking cost effective solutions to improve storage utilization without impacting performance. The CloudByte founders have built a world class product to address this issue. At Nexus, we look to back companies that address infrastructure pain points in the migration to the cloud and we are excited about partnering with CloudByte”, Sandeep Singhal, Nexus Venture Partners, said.

With a strong development team based out of Bangalore, CloudByte has already filed several patents and has a number of pilot projects underway with leading cloud service providers, enterprises, and storage resellers. CloudByte provides service providers and enterprises a carrier grade multi-tenant storage solution with predictable performance, secure isolation, and ease of administration, based on open standards and at an affordable price point. CloudByte 5.0 is a software only solution that is highly scalable with an open architecture based on industry standard protocols which enables customers to consolidate their existing storage infrastructure and expand seamlessly using commodity hardware.

Exclusive Interview:

In what way will the funding be used? Who'd be joining the board at CloudByte?

The funding will be used for the following. Firstly, it will be used to acquire customers in India and US. It will be also used to build the second release of the product by end of 2012. Sandeep Singhal from Nexus Venture Partners will join the board of Cloudbyte

CloudByte's technology has a great differentiator. How big an advantage is that?

Our technology is disruptive in the sense that it is a completely new way of looking at the storage environment. However, the key factor is that we do not change any of the storage interfaces. Hence Customers can deploy the product in their existing environment without any change or disruption. We enable the next generation of storage virtualization where we allow storage to be shared between several users without compromise on predictable performance and secure isolation. Our current prospective customers have indicated that they willing to embrace this new technology in a big way. In fact, as Cloud services become more pervasive, our platform will become the preferred way service providers to deliver storage as a service.

How do you see the road ahead for cloud?

The cloud has brought about a change in the way IT is delivered to the business. In future, IT will almost exclusively be delivered as a service based on defined SLAs. This enables the IT infrastructure to be flexible to the business needs. For example, provisioning a new application will happen within hours versus days or weeks(today). This is the biggest change that the advent of cloud has brought about. Private clouds have already taken off in a big way in 2011 and 2012. We expect the pervasive public cloud to also take off in the next few years.

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