Startup Platform9 Systems, Inc. has emerged on the private cloud scene, formally announcing its presence yesterday along with a $4.5 million Series A funding investment from Menlo Park, Calif.-based Redpoint Ventures. Platform9 claims its Software as a Service (SaaS) platform can transform an organization’s existing infrastructures into “an agile, self-service private cloud” and offers the “simplicity of Amazon Web Services (AWS)-like public clouds” with complete ownership of all resources and data.

Fully compatible with OpenStack application programming interfaces (APIs), the Platform9 service is touted to be different from those provided by Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., Metacloud, Inc., Mirantis, Inc., ServiceMesh and other private cloud providers that support OpenStack because Platform9 claims to be the first 100 percent cloud managed platform for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), Docker and VMware vSphere. “There are other OpenStack vendors in this space but only Platform9 lets customers create a private cloud and get up and running in five minutes, without having to deploy complex management software on-premise,” co-founder and CEO Sirish Raghuram told SiliconANGLE.

Dave Bartoletti, Principal Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations at Forrester Research

Freedom from the need to install software is Platform9’s biggest differentiating claim. “ServiceNow is one of many companies that have proven there’s a market for SaaS versions of what has traditionally been on-premise installed management ​software. This takes it to the cloud management space, a market that suffers today from a mad rush from every existing infrastructure vendor,” Dave Bartoletti, Principal Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations, at Forrester Research told SiliconANGLE. “Watch for the existing cloud management players to offer components of their tools as SaaS in the coming months.”

Platform9 currently supports KVM and will soon add support for VMware vSphere and Docker. KVM is “a very popular virtualization platform in the public cloud (and popular in private as well),” Bartoletti explained. “vSphere is in nearly every enterprise and Docker is the container technology of the year—loads of cloud developers want to build for Docker containers if they don’t already.”

Bartoletti said having broad hypervisor and container support is important but that it’s not enough to differentiate. He said that the real differentiator will be in developer user experience and how the resulting private cloud will be easier for developers to use than the public cloud.

Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9

Raghuram told TechCrunch that, right now, he sees AWS as their key competitor because today the public cloud makes it easier to allocate and manage these types of resources. “Our biggest competition is AWS because they’ve set a high bar for the ease of use that the private cloud has never been able to match—until now with Platform9,” Raghuram explained to SiliconANGLE.

Platform9 has plans to allocate Redpoint Ventures’ $4.5 million to further accelerate their road map and growth. “We’re looking to scale our cloud service to support hundreds of customers, from the 12 customers who are in beta today,” Raghuram said. “In addition, we plan to double our engineering headcount by Q1 2015.”

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Platform9 was co-founded in 2013 by four former VMware engineers, namely CEO Sirish Raghuram, Head of Product Madhura Maskasky, Head of Engineering Roopak Parikh, and Chief Architect Bich Le. Meraki founder Hans Robertson and former VMware executive Bogomil Balkansky are advisers.

Platform9’s general availability is planned for later this year; the company will showcase its product at VMware’s VMworld Conference later this month.

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Photo credit: Pensiero via photopin cc

Photo of Dave Bartoletti courtesy of Forrester Research

Photo of Sirish Raghuram courtesy of Platform9