FastScale raises $5.5 million, so what’s next?

FastScale Technology, a provider of virtualization and cloud computing management software for the next generation datacenter, raised $5.5 million in a Series B round of funding in this difficult economy thanks to ATA Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures, and Hunt Ventures.  As this is quite an accomplishment, I wanted to reach out to the company and find out what comes next now that the difficult part of raising money is over.  In speaking with Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale, I was able to learn a bit more about where the company is currently at and where they are heading.

[ Find out more about the FastScale Composer Suite that includes Microsoft Windows support | Is it too early to talk about defining the cloud and creating an open cloud manifesto? ]

InfoWorld: What are your plans for your new round of funding? 

FastScale: The Series B funds are targeted in three primary expansion areas.  First, we will be expanding our direct sales and services teams to capitalize on growth in our enterprise customer base.  Second, we will be increasing our technical support and engineering resources for our current and planned VAR and OEM partners.  Finally, we will be growing our engineering organization to enhance our core software management platform for enterprise datacenters and launch new technologies targeting cloud computing. 

InfoWorld: An up round in this economy is significant.  What do you see as the greatest market opportunities right now? 

FastScale: FastScale is really fortunate to be providing enabling technology for several software sectors projected to grow significantly in 2009 — virtualization, datacenter consolidation, SaaS, and cloud computing.  FastScale’s family of integrated software management platforms and solutions for next generation datacenters provide customers with a unified and fully automated software solution for managing physical, virtual, hybrid, and soon, off-premises cloud server infrastructure — a solution that tackles complexity, enables greater consolidation, and significantly reduces cost.  In the current economic climate, these are top priorities for most datacenters. 

InfoWorld: Recently FastScale announced a beta program for FastScale Stack Manager Workstation Edition.  Do you see the cloud as a large portion of your market moving forward or will you focus on both FastScale Composer Suite and FastScale Stack Manager? 

FastScale: We consider FastScale Stack Manager Workstation Edition to be a logical extension of our FastScale Composer Suite platform.  FastScale Stack Manager Workstation Edition targets individual users where our FastScale Composer Suite targets large enterprises.  We consider FastScale innovation to be groundbreaking in its ability to automatically build lightweight software stacks and provide the underlying repository infrastructure to managing software environments throughout their lifecycle.  The Workstation Edition enables individual VMware administrators, Amazon EC2 administrators, and developers to use and benefit from this powerful technology that was previously available only to large corporate customers.  We are very excited about the potential of this. 

InfoWorld: People may not know you have a Beta program going on right now.  How has the traction been thus far? 

FastScale: We just launch the program on April 6th, and the response has been greater than expected.  So far, we have seen a great mix of use cases including VMware system administrators interested in running workloads in the cloud, IT architects from large enterprises, developers of cloud solutions, IT users from cloud providers, and even some government users.  We will be able to accommodate new users through the end of April, so we hope to keep the positive momentum going. 

InfoWorld: What do you see for this year?  Or, what’s up next for FastScale? 

FastScale: We consider 2009 to be a milestone year for FastScale.  With the continued growth of our enterprise IT customers, new products targeting individual administrators and developers, new channel and OEM partners, and exciting new offerings for cloud computing, we expect this to be a year of strong growth and significant innovation.

Special thanks to Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale for taking the time to speak with me.