Sean Lynch | Openstack Summit 2014 [ Atlanta, GA ]
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2014-05-13

Sean Lynch, Metacloud, at Openstack Summit Atlanta 2014 with John Furrier and Stu Miniman

@thecube
#openstacksummit
Just before the end of the live broadcast of day one of this week’s #openstacksummit from Atlanta, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE had a last minute guest. The CEO of Metacloud and alumnus of theCUBE, Sean Lynch, dropped in to share with co-hosts Stu Miniman and John Furrier the successes and general goings on with his company since his last appearance on theCUBE.

The conversation began with Furrier noting that Metacloud had only just recently completed a very successful series B round of funding that garnered the company some $15 million. Lynch boasted he was able to initiate the round and complete it without ever really having to leave his desk. “We’ve had inbound from VC’s,” he claimed. “We were going to raise at the end of the year but got so much inbound it felt right to do our B-round.” While they stopped at $15 million, Lynch is confident they could have easily raised much more. “The good thing about a SaaS business is that you hit this inflection curve at a certain point,” he explained. “Investors like investing in a company like that.”

Metacloud, it should be noted, is primarily a software player. “We don’t have any infrastructure,” he said. “We go into our customer’s on-prem data centers and leverage the internet for the rest.” The high interest in funding has led Lynch to believe his company is becoming more of a household name. “We want to go big on product marketing this year,” he stated. His goal is to continually innovate so that existing customers, when they log into their private Cloud, will often be presented with new value-add features.



Lynch credits the success of his company over the past year with Metacloud’s having operationalized OpenStack as an integrated stack. As he explains, “[Our customer can] get OpenStack with having to get OpenStack.

But the biggest feather in the cap of both Metacloud and Lynch today was the full-voiced endorsement they received from a relationship they began nurturing with a small client three years ago: Walt Disney. “To have [Chris Launey, Director of Cloud Services and Architecture, Disney] come out today and say that they are all in with Metacloud and are happy with how it works was a huge plus for us,” he stated.

Explaining the basis of the Metacloud product, Lynch stated they tend to refer to it as “SaaS-based OpenStack.” As they actually stay out of the OpenStack core, itself, Lynch explains that their IP is mostly additive. “We play nicely with OpenStack. We do the innovation and every private Cloud in our system benefits from it.”

As he has done in several conversations today, Furrier left the last word to the guest to share their perspective on just why, at this point in history, the industry and market are so easily disrupted and why that is important.

“What you’ve seen is that the value has been ripped out of the bare metal server. It is about going up the stack to yield value to the end user,” Lynch offered as an explanation.