Cloud infrastructure startup HashiCorp just launched a new product to make it incredibly simple for users to set-up and run its software on any cloud platform.
Since HashiCorp first started as an open source side-project in 2010 and launched as a company in 2012, its suite of cloud tools have gained popularity among developers, leading it to raise more than $300 million, including a $175 Series E round in March that boosted its valuation to $5.1 billion.
On Monday, it launched HashiCorp Cloud Platform, a managed service to let customers automatically run HashiCorp's products on multiple clouds. Previously, users needed to download HashiCorp's software, install it, and set it up to run it on the cloud themselves, whether they used Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or a combination of those. Now, customers don't need to set HashiCorp tools up and get them running on the cloud themselves: HashiCorp is making the process from purchase to deployment much easier.
"The difference here is rather than downloading software and you have to run it yourself, you just go to the Amazon portal and we'll run it for you," HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet told Business Insider. "You won't have to manage it and keep it up and running."
McJannet says that while many of the largest companies want to set up HashiCorp's software and run it themselves so that they can customize it to their needs, there's also a large swath of the market that doesn't have enough expertise or resources and would prefer that HashiCorp does the heavy lifting.
"What the market tells us is that while the blueprint for running cloud infrastructure is well understood, there is a skills gap to how people run it," McJannet said.
Consul, one of HashiCorp's most popular products for service networking on AWS applications, will be the first service available on HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Companies can request early access to a private beta of this product.
HashiCorp has long been a proponent of multi-cloud
The new product allows customers to use multiple clouds at once to run their data and applications, something that HashiCorp has long been a proponent of. HashiCorp allows customers to interact with different clouds in a consistent way, McJannet says, and has strong partnerships with all three of the major cloud providers.
Because of that, HashiCorp doesn't face the same competition from cloud giants that many of its open source peers do. For example, companies like Redis Labs and Confluent have had to deal with vendors like AWS selling their free software on their cloud
"There's really no incentive for cloud providers," McJannet said. "Why would Amazon create a provisioning product that works on Azure?"
HashiCorp now has 1,000 employees and plans to invest in its product, engineering and customer support teams with the funding it raised in March, with ambitions to create other managed versions of its products and make sure it has a field organization for selling to (and supporting) customers.
This will all help in HashiCorp's ultimate goal of becoming a "large standalone independent company" like ServiceNow or VMware, McJannet says. In February, it hired Brandon Sweeney from VMware as its chief revenue officer.
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