Mountain View-based new cloud computing company ZeroStack has just come out of stealth and announced a $5.6m Series A funding round. In conjunction with the announcement, we interviewed Ajay Gulati, the co-Founder and CEO of the company, already a senior architect and R&D lead at VMware where he designed products including Storage I/O control, Storage DRS and DRS.
FinSMEs: Hi Ajay, now we can speak about ZeroStack. You have just existed stealth and maybe you can say a bit more…Which problem do you solve?
Ajay: We are providing a new way of deploying, consuming and operating private clouds for enterprises, who do not have the time or expertise to do it themselves. Existing solutions require enterprises to stitch together complex software stacks along with hardware components. This takes 3-6 months for customers to build and get value from their private cloud deployments.
FinSMEs: How does ZeroStack work?
Ajay: Our solutions provides a unique combination of Zerostack hyper-converged hardware node along with SaaS platform to provide self-service clouds to enterprises with 40-60% lower TCO and faster time to value. The hyper-converged hardware consists of compute, storage, networking and management services all integrated using Zerostack control plane. Customers can start small and grow their cloud based on demand by simply adding more nodes. This on-premises cloud is configured, consumed and managed by Zerostack SaaS platform that provides operational intelligence to run the cloud.
FinSMEs: Where are you in terms of growth?
Ajay: We are 20+ employees right now. We plan to be close to 50 next year. Right now we have close to 10 beta deployments in field and we have a healthy pipeline of prospective customers.
FinSMEs: You just closed (and disclosed) a $5.6m Series A funding round. How are you using the funds?
Ajay: We are using the funds mostly to do product development and testing. As we launch the company we plan to invest more on sales and marketing as well.
FinSMEs: Future plans?
Ajay: In the future, we plan to add more features in to our solution like Platform as a service, native container support, enterprise features like high availability and disaster recovery.
FinSMEs
26/08/2015