Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Silicon Valley-based CloudVelocity has emerged from stealth mode with $5 million in investment and a technology that aims to remove the barriers of adoption to public clouds.

The $5 million first-round was led by Mayfield Fund. Navin Chaddha, Mayfield’s managing director, said the firm made the decision to invest as the technology is a “major breakthrough.” He explained that the core innovation is that companies can “rent infrastructure from a public cloud but make it look like your own data center.” Chaddha told me the product was developed ahead of schedule, and beta users include a diverse range of midsize and large companies.

CloudVelocity makes it easier for enterprise customers to migrate business applications that are stored on-premise to any public cloud whether it’s Rackspace, Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services. Its still early days, but it’s launching its beta with an AWS-integration.

“[We are] automatically extending the data center to the cloud,” said Rajeev Chawla, the company’s CEO. Prior to cofounding the company, Chawla was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield Fund and an engineer at Sun Microsystems.

CloudVelocity also offers cloud cloning, which enables developers and application managers to launch duplicate apps for development or test purposes. If the primary site is down, applications are automatically moved to the cloud. If the cloud application fails, an administrator is alerted, and it shifts to another cloud instance.

One of the first customers on the beta said that the technology helped them “substantially reduce our expenses.” Nitin Shingate, the VP of engineering for Lealta Media, said the trial worked so well that they are using it ahead of schedule in their production environment for cloud failover.

“This will help ensure that our online business stays available within the AWS cloud,” said Shingate.

The startup is taking on VMware, which provides a hybrid cloud software that enables companies to move to the public clouds that use VMware. “But it’s VMware to VMware,” Chaddha explained. CloudVelocity hopes to appeal to enterprise customers with its cloud-agonistic approach.

Small and medium-sized companies looking to bring their business operations to the cloud but lacking the technical knowledge or resources to do it themselves may have just found a friend in new startup CloudBasic, which is unveiling a tool to move business operations from local servers to Internet-hosted services today at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.

The company claims it can help businesses to build, deploy and customize applications easier and more efficiently than existing cloud-enabled tools.

CloudBasic’s tool, developed using Microsoft’s .Net programming framework, helps companies move key elements of their day-to-day computing, such as Excel spreadsheets, to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud hosting service. The company’s tools target nontechnical users. A tool dubbed CloudBasic AppSheets allows the user to create applications based on existing spreadsheet designs, in addition to mirroring existing references and calculations.

While the company appears to not have much competition in its Microsoft-centric niche, it does have several rivals focusing on Java, a programming framework now controlled by Microsoft rival Oracle. They include VMForce, a joint project from online-software provider Salesforce.com and virtualization software vendor VMware, as well as LongJump, which provides a platform for software-as-a-service offerings.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2008 and privately funded to date, has signed up several customers, including an oil and gas company and manufacturing and logistics operations.

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