Skytap

Skytap, founded in 2006 by a group including Brian Bershad, Brad Fitzpatrick, and Hank Levy, emerged from a University of Washington computer science project. The company's initial focus was on creating virtual environments for software development and testing, a direction heavily influenced by the founders' deep backgrounds in computer science and operating systems. Over the years, Skytap has secured significant funding, including a $45 million round in 2017, to expand its engineering, sales, and marketing efforts, solidifying its position in the enterprise cloud market. A pivotal moment in its history occurred in March 2023 when it was acquired by Kyndryl, the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider, a move designed to enhance Kyndryl's mainframe modernization services.

The firm operates as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, specializing in migrating complex and traditional enterprise applications, often referred to as 'brownfield' applications, to the public cloud without requiring extensive refactoring or rewriting. Skytap's core service allows businesses to run legacy workloads, such as those on IBM Power systems (AIX, IBM i), in major public clouds like Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. This capability addresses a critical need for large enterprises that rely on business-critical applications but struggle to modernize them due to their complexity and dependencies on specific, on-premises hardware. The business model is consumption-based, where clients pay for the cloud resources they use, enabling them to shift from a capital expenditure model for hardware to an operational expenditure model.

Skytap's platform essentially creates a 'cloud within a cloud,' mirroring the on-premises data center environment, including networking and storage configurations. This allows for a 'lift and shift' migration approach that significantly accelerates the journey to the cloud for applications that were not originally designed for it. Key features include the ability to create, clone, and suspend entire application environments in seconds, which drastically improves the efficiency of development, testing, and training cycles. Furthermore, the service provides self-service access to these environments, empowering development teams and reducing their reliance on centralized IT. By moving these specialized workloads to the cloud, Skytap enables clients to leverage the scalability and agility of public cloud infrastructure while extending the life and value of their existing, mission-critical applications.

Keywords: cloud migration, legacy application modernization, IBM Power systems, Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, hybrid cloud, application development, cloud testing, enterprise IT, Kyndryl