Cloud Computing: Ready for growth, Austin software company Gravitant raises $3.8 million
September 1, 2012
Austin-based Gravitant Inc. has spent about five years on intense software development to create a simplified way for businesses and government agencies with complex information technology needs to make better use of cloud computing.
Now that it has a proven system, called CloudMatrix, up and running, the company is seeking investors to back its sales and marketing effort.
The 26-employee company disclosed this week that it has secured $3.8 million in first-round investment from Austin’s S3 Ventures.
CEO Mohammed Farooq says his team is intent on building another sizable Austin system software company, a successor to Tivoli Systems, which went public in 1995 and was bought by IBM Corp. in 1996 for $743 million…
"We want to be the next big software company in Austin," Farooq said Friday.
Much of the Gravitant team traces is roots to Exterprise Inc., an Austin e-commerce company that was sold to California-based Commerce One in 2001 in a deal valued at $70 million.
Farooq said he left Commerce One in 2004 to start work on Gravitant, which he says has an early lead in solving a tough problem: how to make it easier for businesses and government agencies with complex computing requirements to make use of cost-effective cloud computing services offered by a variety of service providers.
What the Austin company came up with is an online portal that can help enterprise customers plan, buy and manage their cloud services that may come from multiple cloud service providers in a way that is simple, cost-effective and secure.
Farooq said his company completed its development of its CloudMatrix platform a year ago and began working with the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) to provide a cloud "broker" platform service to select state government agencies.
When the state published a white paper detailing the success of its pilot program a few weeks ago, the DIR and Gravitant began getting calls from federal and state government agencies, cloud service providers and corporations asking to evaluate the software.
Now the company is expanding its sales and marketing efforts to take advantage of the opportunity, which Farooq said is substantial.
He said that consulting firm Gartner Inc. calls automated cloud brokering one of the fastest-growing growth segments of cloud computing, with the potential to expand to $5 billion in revenue within a few years.
Cloud computing is seen as a more cost-effective way for businesses and government agencies to get all or part of their computer services handled by service providers in remote data centers. Virtually all the major players in information technology, including Round Rock’s Dell Inc., have cloud computing development efforts. Gravitant is working with a variety of cloud service providers including Savvis Inc., Terremark, Rackspace Hosting, Oracle Corp., IBM, Hitachi Consulting and NJVC, which is a major information technology service provider for the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Austin company expects to license its software to enterprise customers, including government agencies, to cloud service providers and to systems integrators, who provide IT consulting services to business and government. It already has a handful of early customers.