Bhaskar Gorti was previously chief digital officer at Nokia and president of Nokia Software. But he left that company as part of the executive reshuffling under its new CEO Pekka Lundmark. Gorti has now resurfaced as CEO of Platform9, a Mountain View, California, software company that manages distributed clouds.
Platform9’s founding CEO Sirish Raghuram is turning the top job over to Gorti, while Raghuram takes over the role of Chief Growth Officer.
The eight-year-old company has raised a little over $70 million, and it has about 120 employees.
Speaking with Fierce, Gorti called the company a “diamond in the rough.”
Platform9 started as a network infrastructure company offering OpenStack software. It then pivoted to container infrastructure, using Kubernetes management. Currently, it manages about 40,000 servers globally.
“We manage everything remotely for our customers,” said Gorti. “We are completely 100% a software-as-a-service offering.” Customers can bring their own virtualized private clouds that use different software from the likes of Red Hat or VMware. And Platform9 can also manage customers’ public clouds.
Raghuram said in a statement, “We have proven that instead of locking-in to the public cloud walled gardens or spending years in time-consuming DIY projects, Platform9 offers the only option for innovative enterprises seeking to be cloud-native.”
Currently, 80% to 90% of its customers are enterprises such as the photo sharing company Snapfish and an unnamed “U.S.-based, global coffee chain.”
But now, Platform9 is also targeting the telecom vertical. And it has Mavenir as a partner. Mavenir is involved in various aspects of telecom networks, including the core and the radio access network (RAN). Gorti said, “Where we come in – we provide a platform that transcends the RAN, the core.” And through Mavenir, Platform9 already has some telecom customers.
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Another person in telecom who talks about a common software layer that transcends the RAN, the core and the edge, is Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin. Gorti said, “We just see that as an endorsement that one needs a common platform across radio all the way to the core. We see that as a proof-point that somebody is evangelizing.”
Gorti said, “We sit one layer above the infrastructure.”
In some ways Platform9’s software also sounds similar to Dell’s Bare Metal Orchestrator software, which T-Mobile is helping to co-develop.
RELATED: Dell works with T-Mobile on bare metal, debuts new orchestrator
Dennis Hoffman, general manager of Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business, said there is not a unanimous opinion about the choice of cloud stack, whether it be from VMware, Red Hat or Wind River, for example. “People want choice,” said Hoffman. He said Dell’s solution is to have bare metal, then Dell’s Bare Metal Orchestrator, then the cloud stack of the customer’s choice.