Skydera Launches Cloud Automation Platform

Closes Large Enterprise Licensing Opportunity with SIOS Technology

SAN JOSE, Ca., July 19, 2010 – Skydera, a centralized platform to manage multiple cloud environments, announced the beta release today. The Skydera management console provides a single intuitive interface to manage servers, deploy applications, control user access, track usage, and centralize billing. The platform is differentiated by equal support of all distinct features provided by Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, and Slicehost cloud environments, as well as the ability to manage internal hypervisor environments (private clouds). As part of the beta, Skydera is offering a special Skydera CloudStart™ program, where the first 100 SMBs to register on the bottom right of the www.skydera.com will receive free unlimited access to the platform for three months.

The Skydera platform looks to address the needs of both enterprises and fast growth businesses with the following feature set:

  • Pre-created server images and templates for all public and private cloud environments,
  • Automatic scaling of compute, storage and network resources based on demand and rule sets,
  • Unified billing reports, showing up-to-the-minute analytics of daily, weekly and monthly operating costs,
  • Integrated analytics of performance and utilization with the ability to add custom names for managed assets,
  • Support for both public and private virtual local area networks (VLANs), allowing enterprises to create their own virtual private cloud,
  • Sophisticated user permissions and reporting that restricts cloud asset usage based on roles, supporting remote administration,
  • Disaster discovery options with failover capability across any cloud environment,
  • Automatic monitoring of Service Level Agreement violations,
  • Both an SaaS and on premise installation model,
  • Advanced services, including VPNs, virtual private clouds and data replication,
  • Cost effective “pay-as-you-go” pricing for SMBs, and annual licensing contracts for Enterprise customers.

“Skydera addresses the top four concerns inhibiting cloud adoption as reported by analysts such as IDC,” says Skydera Founder and CEO Lecole Cole. “We will enable companies to deploy enterprise-level applications securely within private clouds, virtual private clouds and public clouds while directly addressing security, availability, performance and cost management concerns.”

“Skydera’s platform surpasses other cloud automation solutions and is even ahead of systems like IBM Tivoli, CA Spectrum Automation Manager, and BMC’s BladeLogic Suite in many ways,” says Jim Kaskade, GM and Chief of Cloud for data center software provider, SIOS Technology. “We’ve deployed the Skydera platform and believe it’s support for both on-premise virtualized and public cloud environments is what enterprises need. It’s extremely lightweight and easily extended and/or integrated through a robust API.”

Skydera platform development began in 2008 as a result of a direct need to manage across cloud environments. The company is a graduate of the Founder Institute.

Performance: With Skydera’s integrated scaling algorithms, enterprise customers can respond to workload demands automatically. Based on thresholds of CPU, memory, disk, and even network bandwidth, the system automatically responds to increases to demand and automatically scales cloud resources to meet that demand.

Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.