Reliam gets $17 million for its managed services play

Reliam, a company that provides managed services for businesses that want somebody else to manage their public cloud deployments on platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round from Boston’s Great Hill Partners. Reliam says that Great Hill has reserved a full $75 million to fund additional acquisitions and growth.

In the managed services space, Reliam is an old hand with 16 years of experience and a strong focus on AWS. The company is bringing in some fresh blood as well, though. Simon Anderson, the former CEO of DreamHost, is now Reliam’s new CEO and to some degree, it looks like Reliam will be able to offer the kind of managed services that he wanted to bring to DreamHost, where he also played a vital role in backing the OpenStack ecosystem. After leaving DreamHost, Anderson was entrepreneur-in-residence at Great Hill Partners, so it’s easy to guess how Reliam and Great Hill came to work together on this funding round.

“It’s exciting that my collaboration with Great Hill Partners as Entrepreneur-in-Residence has come to fruition with the investment into Reliam,” said Anderson. “Under founder Nate Johnson, Reliam has created a world-class managed services offering and a loyal (and rapidly growing) customer base. Reliam is poised to play a meaningful role in the next phase of cloud adoption with expanded investment in software tools, solutions architects, cloud engineers, and the AWS partner ecosystem. I look forward to my new position at Reliam.”

One of the hardest things in managed services is scaling up a company. With Great Hill putting some money aside to fund acquisitions, chances are that Reliam will go out and bring a number of smaller players into its fold as it looks to compete with the likes of Rackspace and others.

“I’ve carefully built Reliam to be a platform for growth over the last few years, and it is truly gratifying to secure Great Hill Partners’ expertise and investment,” said Reliam founder and president Nate Johnson. “With this funding, we can build out even more capabilities for cloud managed services to support the explosive adoption of public cloud for all sorts of applications – and utilizing the latest cloud services including serverless computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the IoT.”

On top of its managed services (currently for AWS and Azure), Reliam also offers traditional hosting, help with migrations, architecture reviews and support for moving to a modern DevOps model. Unsurprisingly, Reliam also offers support for hybrid deployments.