Cloudistics

About Cloudistics

Cloudistics operated as an on-premises cloud computing company, established in 2013 by a team that included serial entrepreneur Najaf Husain and technologist Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan. Husain, the CEO, had a track record of building and selling technology firms, including AppAssure Software to Dell in 2012. Varadarajan, the CTO, brought deep experience from his time as an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech and as a founder of companies like AppAssure and Librato. The company was founded to address the complexity and cost of traditional virtualized infrastructure by delivering a public cloud experience within a customer's own data center.

The firm's core business was providing a composable, on-premises infrastructure for medium to large enterprises and service providers. Its business model centered on selling an integrated platform that combined hardware and software, simplifying IT operations and allowing clients to launch applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. This approach aimed to offer the simplicity of a public cloud with the security and control of a private cloud. Revenue was generated through the sale of these integrated systems and associated software services. The company's platform, named Ignite, was managed via a cloud-based SaaS portal, allowing for centralized control over compute, storage, and networking resources. This architecture was designed to be more affordable than public cloud alternatives for many workloads.

The Cloudistics platform aggregated compute, storage, and network resources into pools that could be used to provision independent virtual data centers. A key product was the Ignite Cloud Platform, which integrated hardware, virtualization, and management software into a single offering. This platform was designed for bare-metal performance and included features like automated management and software-defined resources. Cloudistics offered different editions of its platform, such as the Guardian Edition, which was optimized for highly regulated sectors like government and finance. In a significant strategic move, data center chip maker Fungible Inc. acquired the assets of Cloudistics in September 2020 to leverage its software for composing disaggregated data center resources. This acquisition integrated Cloudistics' software capabilities with Fungible's Data Processing Unit (DPU) technology. Subsequently, Microsoft acquired Fungible in January 2023 to enhance its own data center infrastructure.