Why Eastlink Invested in Omnistrate
Steven Xi, Siyu Jia
TLDR (by ChatGPT): Eastlink is excited to back Omnistrate in their mission to simplify multi-cloud SaaS solutions. Omnistrate’s control-plane-as-a-service abstracts away the complexities of cloud management and allows software companies to focus on core competencies.
Launching cloud products is complex and non-trivial work. Many software companies, especially those that emerge from open-source projects and seek to build SaaS solutions for monetization, encounter this universal challenge. They face limited options: either reinventing the wheel with extensive engineering resources or spending a fortune on consulting-based solutions. For instance, the ClickHouse team took a year to reach the General Availability of their service in AWS on a subset of regions with others to follow. This is where Omnistrate comes into play, aiming to disrupt the status quo and provide a more efficient solution.
So what exactly does Omnistrate do? Omnistrate provides a control-plane-as-a-service that enables software companies to build multi-cloud SaaS solutions in a matter of minutes. Simply provide your docker image and specify what infrastructure and experience you want; the Omnistrate platform takes the docker image to configure multi-cloud managed service with customizable API hooks that allow you to integrate preferred toolings seamlessly. With a single click, your software, no matter open-source or closed-source, data infra or applications, can operate across multiple regions, cloud vendors and environments. We loved the founders’ analogy that Omnistrate is like the OS for clouds: it abstracts the cloud complexity away and relieves the burdens on API management, fleet management, security, observability, and billing, etc, so that software companies can focus on innovating their core technologies and features.
Building a solution like Omnistrate requires an incredibly special team with in-depth domain knowledge, and we believe Kamal and Alok are second to none. Kamal led the Kafka engineering across all the channels and grew cloud revenue by more than an order of magnitude in his tenure at Confluent. Prior to that he had more than a decade of experience in building more than half-a-dozen cloud services at AWS, where he ran the database engineering for Aurora MySQL and grew the service from 0 to a billion dollar service. Alok was one of the technical authors of the revolutionary Aurora Serverless, and then went to Cisco to scale the networking pipeline on AWS by 10–15x. His path came across with Kamal’s again at Confluent, where he played a key role in significantly improving the throughput and reducing the latency for Confluent Cloud. The duo have been contemplating the problem of streamlining the process of building and releasing multi-cloud SaaS from their AWS times before launching Omnistrate.
At Eastlink, we take pride in identifying and backing mission-driven founders with technical edges to solve critical problems in massive markets. Since success is a marathon not a sprint, we particularly appreciate industry veterans, like Kamal and Alok, who launch ventures out of intensive learnings and groundbreaking accomplishments over the years. Omnistrate provides the building blocks for SaaS, so that software companies can automatically apply them, instead of sweating on Kubernetes / Terraform and figuring out custom in-house platforms. Although there are numerous complications in architecting cloud and software together, the extent of repeatability (roughly ⅓ by Omnistrate team’s estimate) can be hugely taken advantage of. Omnistrate is currently piloting with several customers to refine their PMF. For instance, Omnistrate is helping to accelerate the time to market for a new service by a publicly-listed distributed data infra company, and this is just the beginning.If you are looking to upgrade your software to multi-cloud SaaS and have a centralized layer to provision, manage and monitor your cloud infra across software lifecycle, you really should check out Omnistrate.
We’re very excited to have invested in Omnistrate and be their partner as they revolutionize the paradigm of building multi-cloud services. We believe the opportunity here is huge, as cloud-native is the way forward for software, and multi-cloud is an inevitable trend to prevent vendor lock-in and improve reliability and flexibility. Founded by technical leaders with first-hand experience at Confluent and AWS, Omnistrate is in a unique position to tackle the pain point of SaaSifying software.
