Apcera: The $2.2M Secret Revealed

Last February, the person responsible for VMware’s Cloud Foundry service, Derek Collison, has left the virtualization giant in order to start his own venture, with the main goal of further improving the service of making platforms. The idea behind his new project is to approach platforms not as tools meant for developers, but as proper extensions of the enterprise itself. Collison’s new project, called Apcera, has already raised over $2.2 million in funds.

Source of Funds

Apcera’s $2.2 million funding came from True Ventures, Andreesen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins. Collison’s initial plan is to use the funds to build and assemble the company and the team, owing to the fact that Apcera is in “stealth mode”, with the Collison himself being the only employee and CEO of the company so far. The former VMware employee still doesn’t want to reveal too much about Apcera except that he put it up to continue what he started on cloud platforms but something that prepares today for the future.

Simplified Building, Without Sacrificing Compliance

One of the key problems with application building is the dichotomy between application building and compliance with financial and/or regulatory mandates, in the sense that simplifying one means making the other harder. While there are companies such as Cloudabilty that aim to solve the problem by providing visibility into PaaS or infrastructure, Collison says that they are not always effective, since they tend to be added after the fact. With Apcera, the visibility and compliance will be handled “from the inside and out”, so that there are no extra steps needed to meet both sides of the equation.

Interoperability as a Main Goal

As evidenced by Collison’s work in the VMware Cloud Foundry platform, Apcera is willing to work with existing software-defined datacenter companies  and security firms in order to promote interoperability between the database, the software, and the user,  which in turn will allow users to span any infrastructure. Collison himself has admited that a lot of the information and knowledge he is using for Apcera was borne out of his work on Cloud Foundry.

While there have been a lot of companies that have tried to bring some kind of compliance, audit trail, and visibility for enterprises deploying in the cloud, the amount of success is still marginal, so if ever Collison and his Apcera can find a way to make compliance open and interoperable over different platforms, it will be a milestone in the industry.