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♫ Reans can come true. Look at me, babe, I'm with you – Hitachi V

AWS'n'Azure cheerleader with $65m US military cloud contract snapped up

Hitachi Vantara is gobbling up Rean Cloud – a public cloud systems integrator, managed service provider, and AWS pusher that comes with a $65m five-year US military contract in its back pocket.

Here's a potted history of the upstart: Rean Cloud, based in the US, was founded by Sekhar Puli and Sri Vasireddy in 2013. It had a May 2016 funding round of $10.6m, and a July 2017 round of $10m – $20.6m in all. The biz has made two acquisitions: Opex Software in August 2016, and 47Lining in July 2017.

In February 2018, it announced was in line for up to $950m in contracts from the US Department of Defense, a figure that was weeks later slashed to $65m by Uncle Sam's top brass following protests by Oracle that Rean was a front company for its rival, AWS.

Rean is a premier consulting partner in the AWS Partner Network, and a Microsoft Azure silver partner. If you can think of a buzzword, it's on it: cloud-native applications, big data, machine learning, the internet of things, the whole nine yards.

'Significant'

Bobby Soni, Hitachi Vantara's chief solutions and services officer, gushed this week about Rean: "The company has developed specialized solutions for secure, hyperscale, cloud infrastructure migration and management, supported by an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform that allows for significant automation. And it’s one of the few that can support the entire cloud services life cycle.

"To top that, with its 47Lining business unit and as an AWS Big Data Competency Partner, Rean Cloud creates solutions for big data and high volume event analytics, targeted at data lakes and internet of things (IoT) applications. They are quite the company."

Hitachi wants to strengthen its offerings in multi-cloud environments, and Rean fits that need as well as having an analytics capability that should meld with Hitachi V's Pentaho products. It believes moving and managing data and applications across traditional, hybrid, and public clouds requires careful orchestration through a unified cloud platform.

The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

But we can assume that VC-backed Rean, funded to the tune of $20.6m, and with the defense contract in its grasp, did not come cheap. A payout ratio of 4:1 for the VCs would suggest about $80m – and that Pentagon cloud IT contract could have pushed the price even higher. ®

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