GrowthPoint Technology Partners, LLC acted as the financial advisor to Enstratius, Inc. in its sale to Dell, Inc (NASDAQ:DELL), a $57 billion global leader in innovative technology and services.
Founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2008, Enstratius is a cloud infrastructure management solution that delivers a unique way of helping enterprises manage applications and workloads across private, public, and hybrid clouds.
There was a great deal of strategic interest in Enstratius from systems management and cloud technology providers who recognized they needed to address systems management issues in the modern era of cloud computing. The company experienced initial proof-of-concept projects and early deployments into the latter stages of 2012. Beginning in 2013, the company experienced a sudden dramatic surge in sales pipeline. This was a direct reflection of enterprises acknowledging their departments and business units were using cloud computing without the proper governance and compliance controls. Enterprises selected the Enstratius Cloud Management Solution as their solution to bring Cloud Computing into compliance.
The founding of Enstratius was triggered when founders George Reese and David Bagley recognized early in 2008 that cloud computing would be embraced by IT departments of all sizes given the economies offered by the cloud. They also realized that most, if not all, IT managers would want to use more than one type of cloud to avoid vendor lock-in. IT departments have spent a lot of time, effort, and money internally to streamline operations and ensure their governance model adheres to the company’s policies and procedures. Extending these operations and governance models to the cloud is challenging.
Internal developers and business units are bypassing IT (seeing IT as a bottleneck) and now deploy critical workloads in the cloud. After the fact, IT is asked to manage, maintain, and back up these new, cloud-based systems. However, IT lacks the necessary visibility and control of these clouds and so is therefore challenged to ensure regulatory compliance. For example, an employee exits the company, but IT has no way of restricting access to cloud-hosted materials for that user.
Dell has recognized that CIOs face a dilemma — they want to leverage the cloud because it offers huge CapEx and OpEx savings, but they need to ensure that their existing policies and procedures can be extended across public and private clouds. Enstratius helps Dell address these problems by offering a single point of control to implement governance, automation and independence for cloud computing.
Enstratius used a SaaS version of the product to introduce and test new functions and features before selling its Enterprise version. This proved very successful for ensuring the relevance and proof of their product in production. In addition, one of the most unique features of Enstratius’ platform is its cloud-agnostic abstraction layer called Dasein Cloud which quickly connects to multiple private and public clouds, hypervisors, storage platforms, and cloud platforms without having to spend months of development to integrate each stack layer. Today over 20 cloud platforms are supported.
Dell understands its customers will not only use the Dell cloud, but will also inevitably use other cloud platforms. Enstratius allows Dell to position itself at the heart of systems management in the modern Cloud Computing era. We congratulate Dell on the acquisition of a world-class organization with an extremely talented team.
More information about the deal can be found here.
GrowthPoint provides M&A and financial advisory services to technology companies around the world.