The history of cloud computing is longer than you think, with initial concepts stretching back to a time when Gates wasn’t much bigger than a rugrat and Bezos, Brin and Page weren’t even born. However, the technology has exploded in recent years, and now forms a critical piece of infrastructure for entire industries.
As cloud technology becomes more and more mainstream, opportunities have emerged for savvy Seattle entrepreneurs. Some of these companies help data and software evaporate from the oceans of on-premise servers and condense into the cloud. Others focus on helping businesses leverage cloud computing and thereby — ahem — make it rain.
Top Seattle Cloud Companies to Know
- Upbound
- Matillion
- Qumulo
- Skytap
- Axon
Founded: 2011
Matillion’s cloud-native software solutions help to give businesses real-time insights into their data. The company’s ELT products are purposefully built for platforms like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake. Accenture, GE, Bose and Siemens are just a handful of the international brands using Matillion’s cloud-based products to harness their data.
Founded: 2011
SkyKick builds software tools for consultants and IT providers which help businesses migrate, backup and manage their customers in the cloud. The company’s flagship product is called Migration Suites for Office 365, which streamlines and automates the process of adopting Microsoft’s cloud-based work productivity applications. SkyKick claims that its tools automate around 90 percent of the labor involved in a cloud migration, and focuses on creating a user-friendly end product while preserving the data they’re moving.
Founded: 2013
To make life easier for law enforcement officials and other groups, Axon has developed cloud-based technology for storing information. Axon Evidence collects and organizes data, providing additional support to agencies in areas without access to high-speed internet. While this platform handles administrative duties, officers can harness the power of other Axon tools to manage risk and address conflicts.
San Francisco-based collaboration software company, Atlassian, is on a mission to help teams organize and complete projects. Its cloud products, including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello and OpsGenie, are hosted on Amazon Web Services and run on a PaaS environment that is split into two main sets of infrastructure, Micros and non-Micros.
Founded: 1998
Clean Power Research is a cloud solutions provider in the renewable energy space. Its suite of SolarAnywhere products offer access to data services and intelligence that can support solar energy operations. The company also has a range of utility solutions that cover everything from grid planning to managing EV charging for commercial transportation.
Founded: 2018
Upbound manages Kubernetes open source container clusters across multi-cloud environments. The cloud solution allows for users to run, scale and optimize their workloads across clusters, but as a single entity. Upbound is also a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; an open source organization dedicated to making cloud computing universal and sustainable.
Founded: 2006
For older, larger companies that matured before the arrival of cloud technology, the prospect of taking data — often written to work with a specific type of hardware — and reconfiguring it to sit on the cloud sounds like far more pain than it’s worth. Inertia sets in, and the business in question stays with its increasingly outdated hardware while younger, more nimble companies take off on the cloud. Skytap helps those legacy businesses catch up by building customized cloud systems which mimic their existing storage structures, enabling a relatively easy transition. It’s a slow-moving field — the International Data Corporation predicts that only half of enterprises will have modernized their data centers by 2020, leaving plenty of opportunity for outfits like Skytap to facilitate those upgrades.
Founded: 2016
Heptio gives internet leaders access to distributed systems and open source tools. Founded by the creators of the Kubernetes project, the company uses cloud-based solutions to advance the Kubernetes ecosystem. Earlier this year Heptio teamed up with Actapio to create Gimbal- an open source project to help enterprises load balance network traffic in hybrid environments.
Founded: 2006
Bellevue-based Acumatica is an enterprise resource management company focused on helping accelerate mid-sized businesses. Acumatica’s cloud-based applications help businesses track and manage project accounting, commerce, distribution, finances, CRMs and field service. The company recently unveiled construction accounting software designed to improve margins and project control on building projects, and raised $25 million from Silicon Valley firm Accel-KKR in June.
Founded: 2012
The Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) storage system uses a combination of on-premise and cloud-based facilities, and can scale to hold billions of files. The system groups cloud instances or computing nodes into clusters on a single, unified file systems. These clusters connect across globally-distributed (yet intricately connected) systems, where updates by any user on any file are replicated across the system. The company netted $93 million in its Series D funding round in June.
