Cloudly’s Journey:
Over a Decade of Service, Innovation and Growth
Founded in 2012, Cloudly began as a humble Silicon Valley startup with a vision to make cloud migration easier – workloads, apps, servers, databases and data through streamlined and automated workflows. From the outset, our path was guided by a commitment to help our customers migrate to public clouds and embrace the benefits of cloud technologies through the best-in-class tools, systems and platforms. Shah and Ghalib independently had learned about the challenges of moving to cloud from on-premise and data centers through their previous startups and banded with Aniqa to establish the startup in a shared Campbell office.
In our early years, we focused on deeply understanding our customers’ cloud needs and developing our Automated Cloud Migrator platform that would be well integrated with major public cloud platforms – AWS, Azure and GCP. As a Premier AWS partner, we were able to quickly iterate and release our platform for our internal teams by 2013 before we rolled out the platform to our customers in 2014. Our major breakthrough came through working with several customers who were migrating between data centers and cloud, incl. MasterCard, Ericsson, Bluvision, Ellucian, Allan Myers and CloudNexa that accelerated our platform development and we finally launched the GA product at the AWS re:Invent in 2014.
As we ventured deeper into the market, challenges such as heterogeneity of migratable workloads and data as well as public cloud posed deeper problems to solve at scale. Additionally, automated migrations only worked up to a certain extent and too often, needed human interventions due to too many custom workloads. This caused our platform to be used more frequently by our migration and DevOps engineers than by our customers. By mid 2015, we learned that Cloudly would need to combine migration services with the platform and we were getting more deals by working with our customers closely on migration projects rather than letting them leverage our platform independently. So, we pivoted from an automated cloud migration platform provider to a cloud migration service provider in late 2015. At this point, Shah stepped out of the day-to-day role and took on an advisory role, Ghalib decided to pursue another opportunity, and Aniqa took the reins of running Cloudly’s operations with support of our back office.
Cloudly was expanding to undertake cloud integration as well as cloud-native software development projects over the next couple of years, but maintained its niche focus to develop essential tools for cloud migration and managed cloud service. This phase was marked by significant growth initiatives to develop deep CloudOps as well as managed services initiatives across NORAM, EMEA and APAC. The pivot majorly helped in establishing a solid foundation for the company back to the slightly modified version of the original mission – to make customers successful on cloud. By 2018, Cloudly scored its 100th customer and migrated over 500 workloads to cloud by 2020.
Since 2021, Cloudly team has expanded from managed cloud services to deeper infrastructure projects spanning data centers, on-premise systems as well as industrial systems across healthcare, financial, industrial and technology spaces. First the team mastered making software across these spaces work really, really well across cloud and non-cloud environments. In 2023, we started expanding into the networking space once Facebook’s Connectivity unit was shut down and Shah co-founded the LF Connectivity as a top-level Linux Foundation project to pioneer open connectivity and networking. By early 2024, we expanded with our first wave of AI projects and doubled our team size from 2021 levels and continues to grow.
Today, Cloudly stands as a story of persistence, technical excellence and customer success, with a reputation for obsession with solving business problems with technological levers. As we look to the future, we are excited about our focused services in Cloud, Networking and AI in a multitude of use cases across healthcare, finance, industrial and technology spaces. With over a decade of lessons, achievements, and experiences, we are poised for the next chapter in our journey with our revamped leadership and long tenured team of experts.