Blue Box

About Blue Box

Blue Box Group, Inc. operated as a managed private cloud provider, offering solutions built on OpenStack technology. The company was founded in 2003 by Jesse Proudman, who initially bootstrapped the firm as a website hosting company. Proudman, a technical entrepreneur who started his first company in junior high and ran Blue Box through college, recognized the growing need for a simplified path to private cloud adoption for enterprises. This vision led to the company's evolution from a simple hosting service to a specialized provider of Private-Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS).

The company's core business involved providing businesses with a simple, private cloud platform delivered as a service. This model was designed to give clients the security, control, and performance of a dedicated hardware environment without the burden of managing the complex OpenStack infrastructure themselves. Blue Box managed the underlying infrastructure, allowing customers to focus on deploying their applications and workloads. This catered to a wide range of industries, including digital media, gaming, healthcare, and financial services, serving clients like Viacom and BioIQ. The offering was available as a hosted private cloud on dedicated hardware and later expanded to include an on-premises, fully managed OpenStack platform, delivering a public cloud-like experience within the client's own data center.

A significant milestone in the company's journey was its strategic shift towards OpenStack, which was accelerated by venture capital funding. After nine years of bootstrapping, Proudman raised a total of $22 million, starting in 2012, to build out the new product line. The company achieved notable growth, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list in 2013 with a reported three-year revenue growth of 399% and $9 million in 2012 revenue. In May 2014, tech industry veteran Matthew Schiltz, former CEO of DocuSign, was brought on as CEO to accelerate growth, a move that preceded a $10 million Series B funding round. On June 3, 2015, IBM announced its acquisition of Blue Box for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was a strategic move by IBM to accelerate its open cloud strategy and enhance its hybrid cloud capabilities, integrating Blue Box's expertise in managed OpenStack services into its broader cloud portfolio.