Enstratius

» see enstratius.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It started as internal tooling. Valtira, a Minneapolis company that sold marketing software, had built itself a set of controls for running its own cloud operations, and in February 2009 those controls were spun out as a product and shown at MinneDemo under the name enStratus. David Bagley and George Reese were the co-founders. Accounts opened on demand from day one.

The early pitch was security. That framing proved too narrow, because the problem customers actually had was governance across more than one provider, so the product widened into a control plane that could sit above several clouds at once. On the private side it drove VMware vCloud and Citrix CloudStack. On the open-source side it handled Eucalyptus and OpenStack, plus the public clouds everyone was already using.

In 2010 part of the underlying work was published as open source on GitHub under the Apache license, a Java abstraction layer called Dasein Cloud that the commercial product used to talk to each provider. A single Series A round came in November 2011 from El Dorado Ventures and Vesbridge Partners, with Citrix on the same round. In March 2013 enStratus Networks renamed itself Enstratius, Inc., which is the version of the name that made it into the acquisition paperwork two months later.

~ the chronicle ~

~ dell's own cloud ~

Dell announced the purchase on 6 May 2013 and said very little about it, including nothing about the price. Two weeks later, on 20 May, Dell withdrew from the public cloud infrastructure market entirely. The timing reads like a contradiction and is not one: a company getting out of the business of selling cloud capacity still wants to sell you the thing that manages whatever capacity you bought elsewhere. The awkward detail is that the Enstratius platform did not support the Dell cloud at the time of the acquisition, so Dell shut down the one cloud its new product had not yet been wired to.

~ support only ~

Rebadged as Dell Cloud Manager, it ran for three more years inside a company that had larger reorganizations underway. In June 2016 Dell moved the whole line to support-only: existing customers kept their contracts, nobody new could buy it. The domain enstratius.com stopped resolving somewhere after that.

Dasein Cloud outlived the company. It still sits on GitHub, where anyone can read how a 2010 startup thought about the differences between one cloud and the next. The commercial product built on top of it was sold once and renamed once before going on the shelf.

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