In all the talk of cloud computing, Cliqr Technologies CEO Gaurav Manglik says there’s one area of enterprise technology that’s been sitting out the transition — business applications. The cloud has led to an explosion of new apps, but (to pick two random examples) chip design and medical imaging apps are still running on old-fashioned servers.
Naturally, that’s a problem that Manglik is trying to solve with Cliqr, which is coming out of stealth mode today. The company has raised a seed round of just under $1 million from Google Ventures and Foundation Capital, and it’s raising a Series A now.
Cliqr is supposed to take the headache out of moving these business apps onto the cloud. Manglik says that as business apps are doing more and more computation on more and more data, they’re straining against the resources of on-premise servers. On the cloud, those enterprises could scale their computing resources as needed, but there are still obstacles, like the complexity and cost of the migration.
So Cliqr can handle the migration process to cloud infrastructures like Amazon, HP, and Rackspace, hopefully in less than a day. In fact, customers don’t really have to think about their infrastructure at all, Manglik says, and instead they get an “application-centric view of the cloud.”
Manglik makes it sound like there are already plenty of businesses interested in Cliqr’s technology, but I also wondered about the company’s long-term prospects. After all, it’s focused on a specific transition, so will it still be relevant in a few years? Manglik says yes, because there are other advantages to Cliqr’s approach. For one thing, applications are now “unhooked from infrastructure,” you can use the service to move from cloud to cloud. Do pricing changes make you want to move your app from Amazon to Rackspace? With Cliqr, you should be able to switch with a click.
Google Ventures is the financially motivated venture capital arm of Google Inc., founded in 2009. Google Ventures invests in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others. They aim to invest about $100 million a year, with deal sizes ranging from seed to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital. Google Ventures currently invests in the U.S. and has offices in...
Foundation Capital is an investment firm run primarily by entrepreneurs. Each partner left a successful career in industry to work in venture capital in order to work with other entrepreneurs to build great new companies. They have backed successful entrepreneurs across various sectors — from enterprise software to clean technology to consumer Internet and fabless semiconductors. Typically, Foundation makes an initial investment of $1 to $10 million and follow that by participating in each subsequent round of financing. As...
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