Skytap raises $45M for its enterprise cloud

Skytap is probably one of the more interesting clouds right now. Unlike so many other startups, it’s not trying to offer enterprises specific cloud computing services on top of one of the big platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Instead, the company actually runs its own cloud with the goal of helping enterprises that want to modernize their infrastructure bring their existing applications to its service.

As the company announced today, it has raised a $45 million Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, with participation from existing investors. This brings Skytap’s total funding to date to $109 million according to Crunchbase.

Skytap is going up against all of the major cloud service providers, but Skytap CEO Thor Culverhouse argues that his competitors’ clouds were built for greenfield applications while Skytap was specifically built to serve Fortune 500 companies that want to slowly modernize their enterprise applications. The idea, of course, is for these enterprises to then stay on the Skytap cloud as they adopt new development paradigms like microservices and technologies like software containers.

Current customers include the likes of NBCUniversal, GE Healthcare, CA Technologies and OpenText.

To bring these companies to its cloud in the first place, though, Skytap focuses on allowing them to replicate their on-premises architectures on its platform. Those could be VMware setup on Linux, Solaris or Windows on x86 machines, but thanks to its close partnership with IBM, this also includes support for AIX on IBM Power Systems.

Culverhouse tells me that the company is now focussed on building out features like the Skytap Container Management service for companies that want to use containers to bring existing applications to its cloud and to develop new applications on it.

Skytap says that its average revenue per customer grew 60 percent year-over-year in Q2 2017 and that its cloud utilization rate has grown 10x in the last three years.