Amidst Major Growth, Skytap Announces New Cloud Integrations and Hires Microsoft Executive

SEATTLE, Nov. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Skytap, Inc., a global cloud provider, today announced Skytap Cloud integration with third-party cloud services, which will enable enterprises to select services from IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other public clouds to extend the value of traditional applications. These new capabilities will be delivered in the first half of 2018, further differentiating Skytap Cloud as a direct path for enterprises to iteratively modernize mission-critical applications without disrupting business operations.

The company also today announced it appointed Neil Holloway to its executive team as senior vice president of business development. Tapped to continue expanding Skytap's partner ecosystem, Holloway joins the company during a period of sustained growth and momentum. Skytap's business continues to accelerate with five of the company's top ten customers closing this year and existing customer upgrades growing nearly 300 percent year over year (YoY) in Q3.

In search of greater agility and competitive advantage, enterprises are looking to cloud for both new and traditional applications. Hyperscale clouds are often incompatible with the complex dependencies traditional applications have to physical infrastructure, leading enterprises to use multiple clouds for different applications. According to a recent Gartner report, "Gartner's forecast shows that public cloud IaaS will grow at a 28.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2021. Also, Gartner believes that about 70 percent of cloud service segment revenue will be dominated by the top 10 public cloud providers by 2021 — it's very likely that end-user organizations will use more than one (public) cloud in this backdrop."^[1] Skytap Cloud's new capabilities will give customers the freedom to choose the right mix of cloud services for modernizing core business applications.

"It's often impossible to migrate traditional applications to hyperscale clouds without rewriting them, but leaving them in the datacenter is costly, and slows innovation," said Tim Lebel, VP of Product, Skytap. "Enterprises need a clear way forward to extend the value of their most valuable applications with cloud services, and they demand choices in how they use the cloud. We're building a bridge between old and new -- a cloud capable of supporting traditional applications with the ability to also pull in other cloud's best services."

Skytap Cloud integrates with third-party cloud services
In the first half of 2018, Skytap will deliver integrations with third-party cloud services, including IBM Cloud and AWS, enabling customers to easily combine traditional application components running in Skytap Cloud with services running in other public clouds. After joining a selected cloud service to the Skytap Cloud application environment with just a few button clicks, customers will be able to save this hybrid application environment as a template that references the third-party service as an extension of the core application. Teams will have the power to rapidly provision these environments on-demand to enable agile development processes and iterative architectural changes to traditional applications. 

Skytap will deliver integrations with other public clouds' services, such as application services, cognitive capabilities, and data analytics, throughout 2018, making it easy to extend the value of traditional applications with a range of new cloud services. By combining third-party services with its own cloud's unique environments technology, Skytap will give customers a single platform for migrating, modernizing, and managing core business applications through development, testing, delivery, and production.

"No enterprise runs on just one technology stack and each has unique challenges. Too many organizations rush to adopt cloud services before aligning those choices with their business case," said Mark Nelson, CTO, Concur. "Successful cloud adoption starts with deeply understanding your business requirements, then selecting cloud capabilities that meet you where you are, and can take you where you want to go at the right pace for your organization."

Skytap growth accelerates, taps Holloway to broaden ecosystem
Skytap's strong sales growth continued in Q3 2017, while Skytap Cloud usage also surged 188 percent YoY in Q3. Skytap was recently named to Deloitte's 2017 Technology Fast 500, with overall revenue growing more than 200 percent from 2013 to 2016.

The company is bringing in Neil Holloway to continue accelerating revenue growth through strategic partnerships. Holloway has over 30 years of leadership in building, growing, and enabling technology partner ecosystems to Skytap. Holloway has held a range of executive leadership positions, including Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions, as well as President of Microsoft EMEA and Managing Director of Microsoft UK. Holloway was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bath for his contributions to international business. He has a Master's in Philosophy for Organization Research from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Bath.

"The cloud is beginning a new wave of adoption focused on the enterprise's most valuable applications, many of which can't be easily migrated to hyperscale clouds. Skytap has a differentiated offering that complements a range of other cloud technologies and system integration practices," said Holloway. "I'm excited to join a company with a clear product-market fit and I see major opportunities for technology and channel partnerships ahead."

Product Availability
New third-party cloud service integrations will be delivered in the first half of 2018, with more capabilities to follow throughout 2018.

Learn More
Blueworx, a leading interactive voice response (IVR) platform handling millions of calls each day, is already using Skytap Cloud and cognitive speech and language technology to modernize AIX-based applications powering its immersive customer experience services. Watch this demonstration of how Skytap Cloud can power the use of artificial intelligence for an interactive voice response application. 

^[1] Gartner, "Market Trends: Multicloud Usage Will Drive Cloud Management Platform Growth," Matthew Cheung, Laurie F. Wurster, Dennis Smith, 17 October 2017. 

About Skytap
Skytap is a global cloud provider that accelerates enterprise innovation by modernizing traditional applications with cloud-native development and services. Skytap Cloud makes it easy to build, run, and evolve these hybrid applications by rapidly migrating traditional workloads to the cloud, enabling modern development practices, and integrating new cloud architectures. We power multi- and hybrid-cloud strategies through secure connections to other clouds and on-premises datacenters. Our environments technology accelerates application development, simplifies management, and reduces IT costs, enabling hundreds of customers worldwide to modernize at the pace of their business. www.skytap.com 

Contact:
Lucas Welch
Skytap
[email protected] 
206-850-5672

SOURCE Skytap, Inc.

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