Morphlabs Bags $5 Million For Cloud Channel Growth
Cloud platform and infrastructure upstart Morphlabs
The Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based company's funding round was led by BBT of Japan and a private investor group in Indonesia.
Kaz Brecher, vice president of business solutions at Morphlabs, said the cash infusion will fuel hardware acquisition, which will ultimately help partners, and to shore up staffing to help partners with marketing and sales support as they sell Morphlabs' mCloud Data Center Unit (DCU), which wraps Morphlabs' mCloud cloud infrastructure and development technology and integrates it with Dell servers, switches from Arista Networks and storage from Nexenta. Through mCloud DCU, partners get a turn-key, easy to deploy private cloud offering that customers can leverage with no capital expense, only a recurring operational expense cost.
According to Brecher, the pay-per-use model enables partners to put a rack into their data center to serve multiple clients via a co-branded product. Partners can quickly offer hosted private clouds without their customers having to invest in infrastructure.
"We will be launching quite a number of partnerships," Brecher said.
Brecher said the hardware acquisition component will empower the channel, reducing its need to buy the bulky hardware needed to offer cloud solutions to clients. Meanwhile, adding staff to assist on the marketing and sales fronts will give partners a needed boost. Morphlabs expects to increase staff from 25 to 50 by the end of the year.
"People are lacking the technical expertise of how to sell and market the cloud," she added.
Along with fueling channel initiatives, Morphlabs will use the additional capital to fuel deployments in North America and Southeast Asia. Brecher said Morphlabs will also continue to focus on its product roadmap and software development, while enabling partners to take those products to market.
And Morphlabs said its funding push isn't complete. The company said it expects to bring in more investment before the end of the year. Morphlabs' raised a combined $7 million in its two previous funding rounds -- $1.5 million in 2008 and $5.5 in 2010 – bringing its total to $12 million