Alauda Receives Strategic Investment from Intel Capital to Help Accelerate Development of its PaaS Capabilities
News Highlight:
- Alauda closed a new equity funding round led by Intel Capital, with participation by Enlightenment Capital and another strategic investor.
- This is the second financing round that Alauda has closed in the last six months, following a previous funding led by Tencent Cloud.
- The proceeds will be used to accelerate the optimization and implementation of Alauda's container PaaS solutions.
May 9, 2018, Beijing – Alauda, a leading enterprise container PaaS service provider in China, announced today it has received a new round of equity investment led by Intel Capital, with participation by Enlightenment Capital and another strategic investor. The news was announced at the 18th Intel Capital Global Summit in Palm Desert, California.
Alauda will use the funds to strengthen its engineering and field implementation force, optimize its container PaaS and build successful application cases that meet enterprise customers' needs. This latest financing is Alauda's second funding closed within the last six months, following the round led by Tencent Cloud in November 2017 with previous investors Broadband Capital and Banyan Fund.
The advent of the Kubernetes open-source system that enables agile DevOps, automated deployment, scaling, and efficient management of containerized applications has been expediting the innovation and adoption of container technologies. In fact, Kubernetes-based containers have become the core and foundation of Cloud Native concepts. Gartner's latest container-related report* showed that 20% of multinational companies are currently running containerized applications in their production environment, while forecasting that the adoption rate will increase to 50% by 2020. By that time, containerized applications are expected to prevail over non-containerized applications in the enterprise market.
The Gartner report also predicted that all applications to help enterprises realize digital transformation will be microservice-based and containerized (i.e. "Cloud Native"). This trend is in line with Alauda's technology roadmap.
Mr. Yue Zuo, Founder and CEO of Alauda, commented: "Containerized applications will play a much bigger role in the IT industry. Alauda aims to further fortify its container PaaS solutions and develop the ecosystem around its products to catch up to this market momentum. Alauda is honored to receive a strategic investment from Intel Capital. Our Kubernetes-based, microservice-oriented container PaaS will help enterprises realize agile DevOps and build cloud native applications efficiently to accelerate new business development and achieve digital transformation."
Mr. Anthony Lin, Intel Capital Vice President and Managing Director of Greater Asia and Europe, said: "Intel is laying the foundation for future data development, and Intel Capital fully supports this data-driven growth strategy through our investments. Many Chinese companies have started to play global-leading roles in cloud computing technology innovation, including Alauda in the container sector. We believe our investment can help accelerate the advancements being made on container-based PaaS and transform data potential into data power."
Alauda is a Chinese member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®) and has been certified by the foundation as a Kubernetes service provider (KCSP). Mr. Keith Chan, CNCF China Director, said: "We are glad to see the collaboration between two CNCF members, Alauda and Intel, that will further fuel the rapid development of cloud native applications. The announcement also signifies the importance of open source computing. We believe these two CNCF members will bring to Chinese enterprises more and better-quality products and services."
Alauda was founded by the former core team members of Microsoft Azure cloud platform. As a leader in China's container service and enterprise PaaS, Alauda has cultivated strong experience in the development, operation and maintenance of large-scale enterprise cloud platforms. The company has established R&D centers in Seattle and Beijing. Alauda launched "Alauda EE," its enterprise version PaaS, to support private cloud deployments in 2017; it has since become a leading provider of container-based, microservice-driven DevOps solutions in China's enterprise market segment.
Alauda's solutions have been adopted by many of China's top-500 enterprises across a number of industries, including financial services, mobile telecom, manufacturing, energy, aviation and automotive. Alauda's solutions help them to implement cloud-based infrastructure, modernized application architecture and agile application development processes.
* Gartner: "Survey Analysis: Container Adoption and Deployment, 2018", by Michael Warrilow and Dennis Smith, published on March 8, 2018
About Alauda
Alauda (Beijing, China) is a container-based cloud services provider empowering enterprise IT with its enterprise platform-as-a-service offering and other strategic services. It delivers cloud-native capabilities and DevOps best practices to help enterprises modernize application architecture, maximize developer productivity and achieve operational excellence. Alauda serves organizations undergoing digital transformation across a number of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, aviation, energy and automotive.
