Jan 23, 2017 – Boston startup Turbonomic has a new batch of money and a well-connected new ally to help it keep pace in the fast-growing cloud enterprise market.
Turbonomic announced on Monday that it had raised $50 million in financing from General Atlantic, with operating partner Gary Reiner joining the board. The investment values Turbonomic at more than $800 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
For Turbonomic, which offers a solution to help manage applications in a hybrid cloud environment, bringing Reiner onto its board represents something of a coup. The former chief information officer of GE’s other board seats include Citigroup, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Box and AppDynamics, expected to go public later this week.
Turbonomic says it manages 2.9 million workloads today across more than 1,600 customers. The company’s “hybrid cloud” solution tracks the applications used by a customer back to where they are stored, whether it’s in a dedicated data center or server set-up on-site or on one of the leading cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google or Microsoft. Turbonomic decides which applications, an d how much of them, should be running on the resources available.
The ability to analyze performance in that way automatically that most impressed Reiner, who says no other company he’d looked at could do the same in real-time. “The performance goes up and it dramatically reduces the services needed in the data center,” Reiner says. “It allows companies to really move workloads to the public cloud.”
Turbonomic, which rebranded from VMTurbo in August, wasn’t actively looking to raise money when it received the interest from General Atlantic, says chairman Bill Veghte. After previously raising money from investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital and Iconiq, Turbonomic still had much of its previous $50 million raise in the bank, Veghte says. The new funding will allow the company more flexibility to determine if it wants to prioritize profitability or growth. Turbonomic also plans to invest a substantial amount of the money back into research and development.
When it rebranded from VMTurbo, Turbonomic had claimed 24 consecutive quarters of “record growth.” In 2015, that translated to $44.6 million in revenue and growth of 78%, according to a source with knowledge of Turbonomic’s financials. Turbonomic is expected to post similar or slightly lower growth for 2016.
Venture capitalist Ben Nye, a Midas List member, took over as CEO in 2013 after leading Bain’s investment in the company. Founder Shmuel Kliger is currently president and in charge of product. “He’s a rare beast in that he can be both a great investor and a great CEO,” says his new board member Reiner.
Turbonomic is General Atlantic’s second bet in the world of data center and application management after AppDynamics. Because it helps companies move more of their workloads to the cloud and can also make it easier to store applications in virtual “containers,” a technology popularized by Docker, Reiner says Turbonomic is “on the right side of history.”
While part of Turbonomic’s value to customers today is that it can help customers also manage those workloads they keep on their own servers, Reiner argues that the company would do just as well in a future dominated by the public cloud players led by Amazon. “Large companies don’t want to be over-dependent on any one supplier,” Reiner says. Instead, a company like Turbonomic can help a company break up its applications into specific workloads that it could store separately, wherever made the most business sense. Adds the investor: “It gives you a least-cost router.”
This article originally written by/full credit to: Alex Konrad FORBES STAFF
Below is the Press Release from Turbonomic directly, also found at: turbonomic.com
FORMER GE CIO GARY REINER JOINS TURBONOMIC BOARD OF DIRECTORS
January 23, 2017 (Boston, MA) – Turbonomic, delivering autonomic performance for the hybrid cloud, today announced it has secured an additional $50 million in financing led by General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm. General Atlantic joins existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital, Globespan, and Iconiq. Gary Reiner, former Chief Information Officer of General Electric and current Operating Partner of General Atlantic, will join the company’s Board of Directors.
Over 1,600 CIOs rely on Turbonomic to manage 2.9 million dynamic workloads in real-time, improving application performance while reducing costs – not only in their on-premises data centers, but also in their public, private, and hybrid clouds – managing both legacy and cloud-native applications.
“General Atlantic is a world-class investment firm, and Gary Reiner is a world-class IT leader and strategist,” said Bill Veghte, Executive Chairman of Turbonomic. “Their investment and participation is a tribute to the progress the company is making and the opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve IT efficiency and experience. We’re thrilled to have Gary on board to help us grow and scale.”
In addition to joining the board of Turbonomic, Reiner serves on the boards of Fortune 50 enterprises such as Citigroup and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as fast-growing technology firms like AppDynamics, Box, and Seismic. Before joining General Atlantic in 2010, Reiner served as CIO of General Electric, where he led M&A, Sourcing, IT, Operations, and Quality. Prior to GE, Reiner was a partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he drove strategies and operations improvements for high-technology businesses.
“As a CIO, I lived with the challenge of assuring application performance. Delivering autonomic software that matches application demand with infrastructure supply in real-time to maximize performance and efficiencies is an immediate need of the marketplace, as enterprises transform how their IT infrastructure is managed. We look forward to working with Bill, Ben, Shmuel, and the team to help their customers navigate these transitions,” said Reiner. “We believe there is an opportunity to make Turbonomic’s industry-leading autonomic performance platform the standard for hybrid cloud management.”
About Turbonomic
Turbonomic’s autonomic performance platform for the hybrid cloud enables environments to self-manage to assure performance of any application. Turbonomic’s patented autonomic decision engine dynamically matches application demand with infrastructure supply in real time, to maintain environments in a healthy state.
Launched in 2010, Turbonomic is one of the fastest growing technology companies in the virtualization and cloud space. Turbonomic’s autonomic platform is trusted by thousands of enterprises to accelerate their adoption of virtual, cloud, and container deployments for all mission critical applications.
To learn more about Turbonomic, visit turbonomic.com
About General Atlantic
General Atlantic is a leading global growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for growth companies. Established in 1980, General Atlantic combines a collaborative global approach, sector-specific expertise, long-term investment horizon, and a deep understanding of growth drivers to partner with great management and build exceptional businesses worldwide. General Atlantic has more than 100 investment professionals based in New York, Amsterdam, Beijing, Greenwich, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, Munich, Palo Alto, São Paulo, and Singapore. www.generalatlantic.com
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