Around six years ago, Madhura Maskasky began to feel as though her IT career had become stagnant. In search of something more challenging, she began looking around for opportunities that would allow her to best capitalize on the considerable knowledge base afforded to her by her time with VMware Inc. Maskasky ended up cofounding Platform9 Systems Inc.

During the CloudNOW 5th Annual “Top 10 Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards  in Mountain View, CA, Maskasky, co-founder and VP of product at Platform9 Systems, sat down with Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), host of theCUBE*, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of leading women in cloud computing and converging technologies. (*Disclosure below)

The pair discussed the founding of Platform9, as well as the efforts to promote gender equality within the company.

Streamlining multiple 0pen-source frameworks

While still employed with VMware, Maskasky identified a need within the enterprise market to create a platform that would utilize a multi-cloud environment and not only allow multiple, popular open-source frameworks to be used together, but also to do so without burdening the end user with excessive complexity. So in 2013, Maskasky co-founded Platform9, a multi-cloud Software-as-a-Service platform that allows the end user to work seamlessly with existing, extremely popular open-source frameworks like Kubernetes and OpenStack.

“What Platform9 does, simply put, is we take best-of-breed open-source framework, such as Openstack and Kubernetes, and we deliver them as a SaaS service,” explained Maskasky. “So that delivers a very differentiated experience to the end user, where there is very little complexity in consuming these frameworks and going through the process of update or upgrades to the framework.”

Promoting gender equality in the workplace

A large part of Platform9’s corporate culture is focused on ensuring talented women have an equal opportunity to succeed within the company. According to Maskasky, the company’s policy on gender equality is in line with the rest of the Bay Area professional community at large.

“Platform9 is 100 percent supportive of talent regardless of gender,” said Maskasky. “I have myself personally never experienced any kind of bias, so I am a big believer that the tech community in the Bay Area does a really fantastic job of not introducing gender bias.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the CloudNOW – 5th Annual “Top 10 Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards.(*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. However, no sponsorships have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE