Website www.skytap.com Founded 2006 Number of employees 100 | Founder Hank Levy Headquarters Seattle Type of business Privately held company | |
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Key people Thor Culverhouse (President and CEO) Profiles | ||
Skytap, Inc. is a private company based in Seattle, Washington offering a public service for cloud computing. Skytap Cloud provides self-service access to environments for learning, developing, testing, training, and running enterprise applications. The company was founded as Illumita in 2006 and renamed in 2008.
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History
Illumita was founded by Brian Bershad, Hank Levy, and Steve Gribble, a trio of University of Washington professors who had done research on virtualization and cloud computing, and by graduate student David Richardson. Illumita changed its name to Skytap in 2008, and launched its first product, Skytap Virtual Lab, in April of the same year. Skytap received early funding from the Washington Research Foundation. As of 2011, the organization is funded by Insight Venture Partners, the Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions, and OpenView Venture Partners. Skytap Virtual Lab expanded in scope, and was renamed Skytap Cloud in 2008.
In 2011, Skytap won the Best of VMworld award in the public/hybrid cloud Computing Technologies category for Skytap Cloud, and the company has been named to annual top cloud computing provider lists from Deloitte, Geekwire, Seattle Business Magazine, and the Puget Sound Business Journal.
Skytap Cloud
Skytap Cloud is an enterprise service purpose-built for the development and testing of complex applications. Users can import existing virtualized applications or build new applications in the cloud. Environments can be accessed through any modern web browser, REST-based application programming interface (API), command-line interface (CLI), or application lifecycle management tool (Jenkins, Visual Studio TFS, etc.) Skytap Cloud uses a browser-based interface for all system management, and hosts a library of pre-configured virtual machine images. Using either these images or their own imported VMs, users can create sharable configurations of one or more machines, and securely connect to active machines via a proprietary HTML5-based browser client.