CloudSwitch

About CloudSwitch

CloudSwitch was established in 2008 by co-founders Ellen Rubin and John Considine. The founding vision emerged from the observation that while enterprises were intrigued by cloud computing, they faced significant hurdles in adoption. Rubin, an experienced entrepreneur with a background in marketing at Netezza, and Considine, who previously served as Director of Engineering at Sun Microsystems, shared a vision for bridging enterprise data centers with the cloud.

The company developed a software appliance that functioned as an enterprise gateway to the cloud, enabling businesses to move their applications between their private data centers and public cloud environments without necessitating changes to the applications themselves. This addressed a critical market need for a hybrid approach, allowing enterprises to leverage the scalability and cost-efficiency of the cloud for workloads like development and testing, while maintaining their existing on-premise infrastructure. The product, CloudSwitch Enterprise, was a downloadable software appliance that installed into VMware and Xen environments, supporting the migration of Windows and Linux virtual machines to clouds like Amazon EC2 and Terremark. Key features included point-and-click simplicity, end-to-end encryption, and the ability to manage cloud-based applications with existing data center tools and policies, thus avoiding vendor lock-in.

CloudSwitch operated on a subscription license business model, with an annual license for its Enterprise edition priced around $25,000. The company successfully raised $15.4 million over two funding rounds, with investors including Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture, and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The firm's trajectory culminated in its acquisition by Verizon in August 2011 for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was a strategic move for Verizon to bolster its enterprise cloud services portfolio, integrating CloudSwitch's technology with its Terremark IT services subsidiary to enhance its hybrid cloud capabilities.