Cloudistics: Reinventing Cloud

Najaf Husain, Founder & CEO

Since 2013, Cloudistics has gone beyond the IT status quo—public cloud, private cloud, or virtualization—by delivering a composable, programmable, all-inclusive private cloud platform. It gives customers a premium experience that improves on every aspect of cloud, from deployment through day-to-day operations. Cloudistics ensures that organizations of all sizes can rely on an application-centric cloud that is built to be simple, agile, and transformative.

Whether organizations choose Cloudistics as their primary platform or as one among many in their multi-cloud ecosystem, Cloudistics accelerates service delivery while cutting costs and complexity, whether the organization is replacing a legacy virtualization infrastructure, repatriating workloads from the public cloud, or pursuing full-fledged digital transformation.

In this interview, Najaf Husain, Founder and CEO of Cloudistics, shares some insights about the organization’s cloud solutions and services, their unique value proposition, and their roadmap for the future.

What are the technological challenges that companies face in the cloud technology space and how is Cloudistics effectively addressing these issues?
Organizations still struggle to achieve quick, simple, and efficient application service delivery with predictable costs and complete control. To remedy that, our Cloudistics Ignite platform automates the assembly, orchestration, and optimization of application resources, application deployment, and application scaling, with a singular focus on ease-of-use for admins and users alike.

In 2016, Cloudistics introduced the first “Customer- Inspired Cloud” based on its experience with public clouds, the complexities of DIY private cloud science projects, and the costly maze of virtualization licenses and management tools. We realized that thousands of customers need cloud agility and scale while maintaining data sovereignty and predictable cost controls, but couldn't find a technology without tradeoffs. So, we built one.

As a fully-composable software-defined and clusterless private cloud platform, Cloudistics Ignite comes with a secure and independently scalable network, and storage and compute building blocks. Unlike other approaches, organizations can grow and scale resources independently and on demand, freeing IT staff to concentrate on strategic projects versus managing and fine-tuning hardware for application performance.

Please walk us through your cloud technology solution and the benefits it offers to the clients.

Cloudistics is the world’s first, fully-composable/disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform that’s suitable for the needs of any organization; scaling from a single small installation to large multi-site, petabytescale implementations. With the Cloudistics Ignite Cloud Platform, organizations can concentrate more on strategic projects rather than just keeping the lights on, thanks to our differentiating platform design principles:

1. All-inclusive, fully-composable, software-defined: the platform is one of the first CDIs that’s completely software-defined from the cloud down and the hypervisor up, and suitable for any size organization.

2. All-inclusive: it comes with a single management interface that spans hardware, virtualization, cloud capabilities, application delivery, security, data analytics, and multi-site data protection. No third-party tools needed.

3. Automated, orchestrated: application resources are automatically orchestrated and optimized with no hardware management.

Cloudistics is the world’s first composable/ disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform where everything is software-defined and automated

4. Accelerated: rapid application deployment that takes only a few minutes to deploy dozens or even hundreds of workloads. Includes secured, access-controlled self-service provisioning for admins and developers alike.

5. Application Marketplace: includes an integrated app store with operating system and application templates. The platform supports live migration of application virtual images or active virtual machines from older platforms.

6. Secured and protected: we include RBAC, micro-segmentation, built-in firewalls and other capabilities to enhance security and build on defense in depth. We also include snapshots and replication for offsite data protection.

7. Intuitive integration: an IT generalist can monitor, and maintain a Cloudistics multi-site cloud without special training, certifications, or hard-to-source skill sets.

8. Early insight support: a premium approach to proactive support and partnership for all organizations, not just the few who can afford premium support. Managed patch and update process for all aspects of the platform.

In short, our design principles translate into a transformative experience for users and administrators. We give users easy access to cloud computing resources on a platform that is a safe, secure, and controllable alternative to shadow IT. Organizations can trust the Cloudistics platform to help them accelerate service delivery at scale and drive innovations at scale.

Could you please discuss a case scenario where Cloudistics’ solutions helped a company in addressing their challenges?

A financial services firm with a global reach, headquartered in Texas, chose Cloudistics as the only platform to support its digital transformation. After evaluating public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise virtualization, it concluded that Cloudistics provided all the capabilities of public cloud, allowing the company to migrate away from a legacy virtualized environment while maintaining control of its data. In addition, Cloudistics offered a higher level of support than public cloud, greater predictable performance, built-in snapshots and replication, and the ability to manage multiple sites from a single console. Performance and reliability gains have accelerated the company’s transition, enabling it to begin tripling its development team and begin a multi-site expansion to better serve its customers with the power of Cloudistics.

What are the differentiating factors of Cloudistics?

Our overarching goal is to ensure that our customers have a premium experience first, last, and always. From white-glove deployment all the way through troubleshooting and problem solving, we offer a different class of experience.

Our design is customer-inspired. Our cloud journey through all the status quo technologies was costly, complicated, and confused. Customers know we have experienced their pains and have built a platform to solve their challenges. We've intentionally designed the platform to serve the needs of organizations that are digitally transforming away from legacy architectures, those who need to bring public cloud workloads in-house, and managed service providers who want to provide cloud services to their customers.

We also go beyond the vendor relationship. Many HCI/ cloud vendors are just that, vendors. We want to be a cloud IT and development partner, helping customers overcome the barriers to cloud adoption so they can achieve digital transformation success. From a platform perspective, Cloudistics Ignite is an all-inclusive fully-composable, software-defined, private cloud platform. It includes end-to-end application resource automation, orchestration and optimization as well as an integrated application marketplace. It includes data encryption, micro-segmentation, RBAC, built-in firewalls and other capabilities to boost security, has integrated snapshots and replication for data protection, and offers comprehensive analytics for performance, utilization, and business insight. All this can be controlled by an IT generalist using a single web-based control plane and comes at no additional cost.

Can you share details of the firm’s plans pertaining to new solutions and technologies that could play a role in the company’s offerings in the near future?

We recently announced a new relationship with Lenovo, a leading global datacenter IT vendor, to supply the software for their ThinkAgile CP composable cloud platform. Adjacently, we are expanding our range of strategic partners in North America and EMEA. Through these relationships, we are building our future and transforming how the private cloud is sold, implemented, deployed, operated, and maintained. Our channel relations are accelerating rapidly since we started selling at the end of 2017 and they are continuing to grow. We continue to add more application templates to our Application Marketplace, and, due to customer input, we recently added three new tools to the platform—Access Manager, Metering Manager, and Migration Manager—to enhance ease-of-use and make control, reporting, and cloud migration easier than ever.