Stratoscale

Stratoscale was a software company focused on the cloud computing and hyper-converged infrastructure market, which ceased operations in late 2019. Founded in 2013 by serial entrepreneur Ariel Maislos and Etay Bogner, the company was established to address the complexities of data center management. Maislos, who served as CEO, had a notable background, having previously co-founded Anobit, a flash storage company sold to Apple, and Passave, a semiconductor company acquired by PMC-Sierra. This experience in storage and technology innovation directly informed Stratoscale's mission.

The company's core business was developing a software-defined data center platform, Stratoscale Symphony, which aimed to deliver an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-like experience within a company's own on-premise data center. It provided a unified management layer for compute, storage, and networking resources, allowing IT departments to function as internal cloud providers. The platform was designed to run on commodity x86 servers, converging an enterprise's infrastructure into a single stack that delivered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), and Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS). Revenue was generated through a subscription-based model for the Symphony software.

Stratoscale attracted significant investment, raising a total of $70 million from prominent backers including Intel Capital, Cisco Investments, Qualcomm Ventures, and Battery Ventures. A key milestone was the 2017 acquisition of Tesora, a US-based company specializing in database-as-a-service technology, to bolster its offerings. Despite its technology and funding, Stratoscale faced intense competition from public cloud giants like AWS, Google, and Microsoft. The market's rapid shift towards consolidation and the dominance of these major players made it difficult for smaller companies to sustain themselves. After failed attempts to be acquired, the company ultimately shut down in December 2019, laying off its 60 employees.

Keywords: Stratoscale, hyper-converged infrastructure, HCI, private cloud, hybrid cloud, data center management, cloud infrastructure software, Ariel Maislos, software-defined data center, SDDC, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, IaaS, on-premise cloud, enterprise IT, cloud automation, data center virtualization, Stratoscale Symphony, Etay Bogner, Tesora acquisition, cloud service provider platform