Stealth cloud computing company CloudSwitch has taken in $7.4 million in Series A funding co-led by Atlas Venture and Matrix Partners. The news was first reported by Scott Kirsner on his blog, and confirmed by Atlas partner Axel Bichara.
Little information is available about Waltham, MA-based CloudSwitch, whose placeholder website merely says it is in stealth mode. But Bichara called it “a wildly exciting company” that is generally looking at making cloud computing available to companies that already have their own data centers and presumably want to make them more efficient while holding down costs. “As a trend, cloud computing is really inevitable, because it’s so much cheaper than people basically owning their own hardware,” he says. One of the big questions, he says, is “If you have any kind of existing infrastructure how do you take advantage of cloud computing?” That is the big need CloudSwitch is trying to address.
CloudSwitch was co-founded by CEO Ellen Rubin and John Considine. Rubin was previously VP of marketing for Marlborough, MA-based Netezza, while Bichara calls Considine a technical “superstar” who was formerly at Pirus Networks, which was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2002.
Author: Robert Buderi
Bob is Xconomy's founder and chairman. He is one of the country's foremost journalists covering business and technology. As a noted author and magazine editor, he is a sought-after commentator on innovation and global competitiveness. Before taking his most recent position as a research fellow in MIT's Center for International Studies, Bob served as Editor in Chief of MIT's Technology Review, then a 10-times-a-year publication with a circulation of 315,000. Bob led the magazine to numerous editorial and design awards and oversaw its expansion into three foreign editions, electronic newsletters, and highly successful conferences. As BusinessWeek's technology editor, he shared in the 1992 National Magazine Award for The Quality Imperative.
Bob is the author of four books about technology and innovation. Naval Innovation for the 21st Century (2013) is a post-Cold War account of the Office of Naval Research. Guanxi (2006) focuses on Microsoft's Beijing research lab as a metaphor for global competitiveness. Engines of Tomorrow (2000) describes the evolution of corporate research. The Invention That Changed the World (1996) covered a secret lab at MIT during WWII. Bob served on the Council on Competitiveness-sponsored National Innovation Initiative and is an advisor to the Draper Prize Nominating Committee. He has been a regular guest of CNBC's Strategy Session and has spoken about innovation at many venues, including the Business Council, Amazon, eBay, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
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