In-memory computing company GigaSpaces Technologies Inc. said Thursday it will spin off its Cloudify business unit into a new entity that’s focused on delivering cloud-based applications and network functions virtualization technology.

GigaSpaces, based in New York, said it has been planning the spinoff since last year due to the growth of its enterprise cloud offerings and the unit’s move into the carrier network orchestration business. It said that the new standalone Cloudify would retain its engineering team and remain based in its existing offices in New York, San Jose, California, and Tel Aviv.

Another reason for the split is that GigaSpaces’ core in-memory computing for data analytics business is transforming into something that’s fundamentally different from its cloud products. As such, the “ideal timing” of the spinoff means that GigaSpaces can provide “greater clarity and focus for our current and possibly future investors,” said GigaSpaces Chief Executive Officer Zeev Bikowsky.

The company’s data analytics and Cloudify units have been operating independently for some time already, though GigaSpaces said the “structural spinoff” is still subject to regulatory approval.

GigaSpaces launched Cloudify back in 2014, billing it as an open-source cloud orchestration platform that’s designed to connect hybrid clouds at the networking layer. The company now reckons that this convergence positions Cloudify to become a leading provider of orchestration services for both applications and networks in multicloud deployments.

“It was always our plan to eventually spin off Cloudify,” said Nati Shalom, chief technology officer at Cloudify. “Based on the impressive growth of the open-source Cloudify project, and increased market penetration of the commercially supported Cloudify product, it has become clear that now is the time to do so. This strategic move gives us the freedom to accelerate engineering development in both product lines.”

Cloudify already supports all of the major public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, as well as private clouds based on OpenStack and VMware. In addition, Cloudify also supports microservices such as the Kubernetes container orchestration manager. Cloudify’s NFV platform is also said to be gaining traction among telecommunications firms that use it to manage their virtual networks, GigaSpaces said.

Cloudify recently announced a major update to its platform that transforms it from being a simple DevOps tool to a fully-fledged application and network management platform. Cloudify 4.0 came with new multi-tenant and security features, as well as support for container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos.

In addition, Cloudify also recently launched what it calls an “orchestration-first” approach to NFV that allows customers to integrate the technology with existing networks. According to the company’s own research, more than half of network carriers would like to integrate NFV capabilities into their expanding cloud environments. The company said at the time its new cloud-native virtual networking program can address the inability of many carriers to run firewalls, routers and switches on virtual networks.

Image: Cloudify