5. Cloudistics: Cloud-based data-center services

Founders: Najaf Husain (CEO), Srinidhi Varadarajan (CTO), Todd Fredrick (CRO)
Launched: 2013
Headquarters: Reston, Virginia
Funding: $21 million

As companies look for more effective ways to control operating costs, they're investing money in technologies that help them run their businesses smarter. That's where the founders of Cloudistics saw an opportunity. The Reston, Virginia-based start-up helps medium and large companies bring the power of the cloud to their data centers in an easy-to-use on-premises hybrid cloud platform. It claims to give customers all the simplicity, elasticity and consumption characteristics of the public cloud, with the predictability of performance, cost and data governance that a private cloud offers.

Company co-founder and CEO Najaf Husain — who founded AppAssure Software, a storage software company that he later sold to Dell in 2012 — says the superconvergence of network, storage, virtualization and management in the enterprise data-center sector is a $100 million business opportunity.

The former Dell executive started Cloudistics to help companies manage this change with solutions that are cost effective, reliable and able to grow and change with customers' needs. The company raised $15 million from Bain Capital Ventures in June and opened its second sales office, in London.

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