CloudShare, a startup that improves the sales process by allowing companies to run software and appliance demos in the cloud, has raised $10 million in a second round of institutional funding. The money comes from some big-name venture firms -- Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital, and Charles River Ventures.
Chief executive Zvi Guterman says the Palo Alto, Calif. company offers an improvement on internally built demo centers, which are expensive, drain IT resources, and are rarely up-to-date. With CloudShare (previously called IT Structures), businesses can address those problems by instantly deploying the latest version of their demo or training environment on cloud infrastructure (web-connected data centers), and sharing different, secure versions with different customers.
CloudShare has also been compared to "virtual lab" companies like Surgient, Guterman says, but those are built for internal use and don't have his company's sales tools (including the integration with Salesforce.com's sales application.)
The company officially left stealth mode earlier this week, though it says it has already delivered one million hours of demos and training to customers like VMware, Cisco, and SAP. CloudShare has now raised a total of $16 million, and says its valuation increased from previous rounds.