Skytap, Fresh Off Boston-Led $10M Financing

Turn on a TV, and you’ll see Microsoft running commercials touting something few men on the street know much about—cloud computing. So if the concept is starting to go mainstream, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of Seattle’s early movers in the space, Skytap, has already made some serious headway with its cloud computing offering in the past year.

The company

The company was founded in 2006 by University of Washington computer science professors Brian Bershad and Hank Levy, back when there most truly weren’t TV commercials on cloud computing. The basic idea with the cloud is that clients rent servers on a pay-as-you-go basis, and get access to their data anytime over the Internet. It’s supposed to allow organizations to save money and headaches by not having to buy and maintain their own in-house servers and other equipment. The big boys of tech—Amazon, Microsoft, Google—are all duking it out for market share in the early days of what some analysts predict will grow into a $60 billion market based on this recent model of computing.

So where does a little company like Skytap, with 30 employees, fit into this equation? During the big players are providing the essential infrastructure, Skytap sees itself as a maker of software that sits on top of the cloud systems offered by the other guys. The software applications are supposed to make sure everything runs automatically and seamlessly, especially when engineers are testing a new product, and teams from multiple geographic locations are trying to collaborate. The software layer of the cloud computing market, where Skytap sees itself playing, is probably worth more like $4 to $8 billion over time, Roza says.

The shift toward the cloud

These are nevertheless very early days in the shift toward the cloud, and there’s a lot of curiosity among clients about what they might consider doing there, Roza says. Skytap has truly had an interesting lens on how this market is evolving. The startup introduced its product about two and a half years ago. So far, early adopters on the IT side of organizations like Ellie Mae, Nuance Communications, Apptio, and Hargis Engineers have bought what Skytap is selling. Skytap as well found its way into an important new stream of government agency clients last September when it struck a partnership with CSC to provide software for that company’s cloud-based development and test service.

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