Cloud computing startup Skytap receives funding from Goldman Sachs

cloud computing Startup Skytap is getting some big Funding this week. The Seattle-based company has just raised $45 million to lure enterprise customers away from the current cloud market leader AWS.

According to TechCrunch, Skytap has received $45 million in venture capital funding. The US-based Goldman Sachs Private Capital led this latest funding round, with some participation from existing investors.

This latest funding brings the startup’s total funding raised to $109 million, TechCrunch reported.

Skytap plans to use the new funds to grow the company’s engineering team and to add support to its core product. The company also plans to use the fresh capital to expand its sales and distribution channel. The new funding is meant to boost the market for Skytap’s public cloud, which is currently competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services.

An overview of the Skytap’s cloud business

For most IT companies today, moving a legacy workload or applications to Google Cloud or AWS can be a hugely daunting task.

The process usually requires extensive IT configurations and eats lots of time. Luckily, Skytap has managed to come out with one good solution. The Seattle-based company provides a cloud-based solution that can streamline the IT task by mirroring the on-premises infrastructure from which an application is imported to create an almost identical copy of the infrastructure.

The startup’s core flagship product is the Skytap Cloud, an extensive set of management options designed to ease the daily IT operations. One of the platform’s most distinguished features is the ability to save the configuration of a deployment as a template for reuse to another deployment. The company’s core product, Skytap Cloud, allows clients to replicate their on-premises infrastructures on its platform.

These could be Windows on x86 machines, AIX on IBM Power Systems or VMWare configuration on Linux. In addition, the company is also adding a new feature called Skytap Container Management to its cloud computing offering.

Skytap currently has around 170 employees and counts big names clients such as Dell Technologies, GE Healthcare, and NBC Universal. The company currently runs 10 data centers globally, with the North American region as its biggest market.

In other cloud-related news

Google this week will release the technical details of the Titan computer chip, the company’s newly added security feature for its cloud computing network. The company hopes that Titan will help the company carve out a bigger slice of the huge cloud computing market, which was recently forecast by Gartner to be worth around $50 billion.

The company plans to disclose technical details of the new chip this week, according to The Inquirer.

The company currently holds a small share of the highly lucrative cloud computing market. The Inquirer said that Google holds just 7 percent of that market, which is too small compared to Microsoft Azure and AWS. The Inquirer also added that the newly announced Titan is part of a strategy that Google hopes will differentiate its services from competition and acquire new customers.