Cirtas heats up the cloud, raises $10 mn

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Further evidence the cloud space is heating up came last week from Cirtas Systems.

The San Jose, California-based provider of a cloud storage gateway device announced it has emerged from stealth mode and has raised $10 million in an oversubscribed Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Amazon.

Cirtas (www.cirtas.com) makes an appliance about the size of a large encyclopedia that bridges a company's storage area network with a cloud-based storage system.

"We make it appear seamless, like the data is stored locally," said Josh Goldstein, vice president of marketing and product management.

Cirtas' Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers are targeted at medium and large enterprises, with pricing starting at $69,995 per appliance. Cirtas, which is in partnership with cloud service providers Amazon and Iron Mountain, has had 16 customers in its beta testing.

CEO Dan Decasper said Cirtas, which has close to 30 employees now, is looking at doubling its team over the next year as the company goes after "thousands" of potential customers interested in secure and simple cloud storage. Before he co-founded Cirtas, Decasper ran two engineering teams at Citrix, served as CTO of Orbital Data Corp (bought by Citrix in 2006) and co-founded and was CEO of Jibe Networks.

At Cirtas, Decasper said he expects the number of customers to take off now that the company has emerged from stealth and more media outlets are paying attention to the cloud industry, thanks in part to a rash of recent funding announcements.