Blue Medora Secures $8.6 Million in Series B Funding to Accelerate Adoption of Cloud Performance Monitoring

Second-round financing led by Lewis & Clark Ventures helps expand global channel sales, marketing and hybrid cloud R&D

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. & LONDON, UK – Oct. 12, 2016 – Blue Medora, a leading innovator in software for enterprise cloud and data centre management, today announced the close of an $8.6 million Series B round led by St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures. Blue Medora’s existing investors VMware, Inc., eLab Ventures, Start Garden and Grand Angels also supported the round, bringing Blue Medora’s total capital raised since its inception to $14.5 million. The new funding round exemplifies a growing shift of VC funding in technology companies outside of Silicon Valley.

Blue Medora creates software that offers a single view of applications, databases and infrastructure to quickly resolve IT issues, increase uptime and optimise performance for business applications. Known for developing extensions for virtualised and application management platforms such as Oracle, IBM, VMware vRealize and New Relic, last month Blue Medora launched SelectStar, its first SaaS-based solution that unifies databases and cloud infrastructure monitoring. These Blue Medora IT operational analytics (ITOA) solutions provide IT managers, devops and database architects with complete visibility to the performance of their IT stack.

“Blue Medora is partnering with customers to advance adoption of multi-cloud, multi-database and dev/ops environments that make IT-as-a-service an economic reality,” said Nathan Owen, co-founder and CEO of Blue Medora. “We are excited to work with a bold and innovative team of strategic partners to help us expand our global reach and enable any enterprise to see everything about their IT operations from anywhere.”

“We believe Blue Medora is providing deep, game-changing insights that weren’t being addressed in the rapidly growing IT operational analytics market,” said Brian Hopcraft, managing director of Lewis & Clark Ventures. “An amazing amount of software innovation is happening at Blue Medora and throughout the Midwest, and we’re confident this partnership is going to accelerate Blue Medora’s ability to deliver the next breed of IT analytics solutions.”

“Blue Medora is leading the charge for enterprise IT organisations to extend the real-time performance and capacity management capabilities of VMware vRealize® cloud systems management platform to help customers avoid downtime and improve service delivery,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. “Our strategic investment and collaboration with Blue Medora will help fast-track the migration to software-defined data centres, enabling a single view of the IT stack across private, hybrid and public clouds, physical environments, applications and databases.”

For additional commentary, see “What the Industry is Saying about Blue Medora.”


Analytics for the Entire IT Stack


The new investments will scale the engineering, sales, marketing and support organisations to continue to meet the demands of enterprises IT departments requiring better insight and intelligence about their infrastructure. This funding follows major company milestones, including:

• Marquee customer adoption – Enterprise customers, across all verticals, including the world’s most popular brands and many of the Fortune 500 are adopting Blue Medora.
• Rapid channel growth – In August, VMware began making the Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite available to its 75,000 channel partners.
• Global presence – Blue Medora has expanded in EMEA and APJ and plans to hire in-region leadership.
• Leading technology partnerships – Blue Medora jointly certified solutions with established and emerging technology leaders such as VMware, New Relic, Amazon, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, IBM, Mongo, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle and SAP.


About Blue Medora


Blue Medora software solutions tie together data from virtualized and cloud-based databases, applications and services with the critical underlying compute, storage and network infrastructure to create a unified view of the infrastructure. These capabilities are delivered through Blue Medora’s SaaS-based database and cloud monitoring platform, SelectStar, and platform extensions for VMware’s vRealize Cloud Management Platform, New Relic, IBM APM and Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control platforms.

Blue Medora’s products enable IT teams to work collaboratively on the infrastructure to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems and make predictive insights using advanced analytics. Blue Medora believes true visibility into business critical applications is only achieved when enterprise cloud management systems communicate without barriers.

VMware, vRealize, and vRealize Operations are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

 
What the Industry is Saying About Blue Medora


John Abbott, 451 Research co-founder and distinguished analyst:
“As a market sector, IT monitoring is seeing a lot of innovation. Using a cloud-native SaaS delivery model, Blue Medora’s substantial data analytics engine provides new levels of visibility into the database tier that multiple tools can utilise,” said John Abbott, co-founder and distinguished analyst, 451 Research. “There is growing demand from customers for a unified view of the data tier, providing context between the database and the cloud/virtualisation layer and helping them move more workloads into the cloud.”

Ken Brower, director of information systems at Cherry Health:
"Instead of database engineers, SAN Managers and server and hardware admins looking at their prospective management software windows, Blue Medora combined all three with an easy-to-use solution. Now all teams can see into each other’s environments and more quickly solve the issue at hand."

Deni Connor, SSG-NOW founding analyst:
“Database and IT administrators face major challenges maintaining uptime and performance for a heterogeneous IT stack. With more IT teams being asked to do more to support the business with fewer resources, having instant access to data about their operations is a significant advantage. The additional investment in Blue Medora is strong validation for the momentum they’re seeing in virtualised and cloud data centres and will carry over to the growing database monitoring market.”

Dale Foster, president of Promark Technology:
“Our customers’ journey to the cloud starts with choosing the right applications and architecting the right environment around them. This business outcome-focused approach depends on both organisational and technological change, so it’s vital to partner with software leaders like Blue Medora to help IT teams become more successful and productive. This is the value Blue Medora brings to businesses around the world and we’re excited about this next phase in its growth.”