Among the many countries of the world, there are a group of nations — Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland — that are considered neutral, without entry into military alliances or the establishment of any army bases. In the war-like battles for cloud supremacy, BitRock Inc. (Bitnami) is Switzerland.

The company, which specializes in the automated packaging and deployment of applications across platforms, leverages a library of installers or software to help enterprises manage an increasingly complex infrastructure.

“We help people bridge the gap between what they’re doing today and what they’re going to do in the future without pushing them in one direction,” said Erica Brescia (pictured), co-founder and chief operating officer of Bitnami. “At the end of the day, we’re platform-agnostic.”

Brescia spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss a newly launched tool, the state of the competitive cloud provider landscape and venture funding for female company founders.

Stacksmith meets IT departments where they are

Bitnami has just officially launched Stacksmith, an enterprise offering that draws on the company’s learning and technology from delivering 140 applications across 14 different platforms, according to Brescia. The product, which launched in February 2018, is not related to an earlier Bitnami product of the same name.

The current Stacksmith enables companies to take existing apps in their own data centers and package, migrate and maintain them on any cloud. It also supports VMware virtualization, made possible through the standards introduced by Kubernetes, enabling companies to avoid a total rewrite of apps code.

“It allows enterprise information technology departments to package up their own applications both for cloud and cloud-native platforms, as well as for whatever they’re running in the enterprise today,” Brescia explained. “It meets them where they are, helps them automate that application packaging and maintenance in place today, and then sets them up to successfully move to the cloud and containers over time.”

Being the Switzerland of deployment tools has given Brescia a wide view of the cloud provider market and changes in the IT landscape. “Amazon isn’t quite the Goliath that it was anymore,” said Brescia, who described ways that Microsoft Azure is pursing new growth. “Azure’s advantage is their ecosystem. They really understand partnering in a way that Amazon’s retail DNA just doesn’t lend itself to that.”

In addition to her involvement with Bitnami, Brescia has also been assisting women entrepreneurs through XFactor Ventures. The $3 million fund’s mission is to invest $100,000 in 30 different companies with at least one female founder.

“It gives us a really unique advantage in the market of venture,” said Brescia, who plans to raise money for a new fund and attract other partners. “We can really be an ally for the entrepreneurs that we’re funding.”

Watch the entire video interview with Brescia below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE