hello folks. it’s been a while since my last blog post about an investment, but there’s a good reason for that. and, yes, this is about another “big data” startup, but allow to me explain why i’m so excited to announce our latest investment: cloud physics

“big data, again?” you ask. it’s a fair question. big data exists everywhere, really…on twitter, on instagram, or inside AWS and other places you may not think of right away. well, what about the the data sitting inside data centers at the systems level? what if a group of highly experienced hardcore technologists left their cushy jobs to form a voltron-like team of exceptional engineers tackling hard problems around data and simulation?

it’s my job now as an investor to help identify, back, and in a small way, help guide the people and technologies that can breakthrough enterprise technology, and with cloud physics, i feel on the right track. led by john blumenthal (ex-VMware) along with irfan ahmad, jim kleckner, xiaojun liu, the leadership has built a team that can focus on making their customers’ virtualized data centers more efficient not only through software, but by finding patterns inside the collective data of across large numbers of virtualized environments. as new technology companies emerge and scale, virtual data center operations become significant costs, but necessary — therefore, finding improvements in those operations directly effect the bottom-line, and john and his colleagues from VMware had a great view into this opportunity given their experience.