JUDGED BY THE COMPANY YOU KEEP: ILLUMIO SECURES ITS WAY INTO THE FIRST EVER FORBES CLOUD 100 LIST

Last week Forbes included Illumio in its inaugural Cloud 100 list, a group of cutting-edge private companies defining the cloud movement in technology. People frequently say you are judged by the company you keep, and we could not be more excited to share the stage with leaders such as Slack, Dropbox, and Stripe. The inclusion of several security companies underscores our sector’s importance as an enabler of innovation and new IT business models. Illumio was the only Adaptive Security company on the list – which was supported by research by Bessemer Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, neither of which are investors in Illumio – which focuses on visibility and segmentation within and across the data center and public cloud.

As important as the recognition is – we like glass trophies for the lobby as much as the next Valley company – the list of judges is a who’s who list of purebred public cloud stalwarts founded and run by rock stars, which include several cloud pioneers such as Salesforce and NetSuite (Illumio customers) as well as the new cloud establishment including Box, Hub Spot and Atlassian. Indeed, we are customers of 8 of the 28 companies on the judging list. No surprise, it takes a cloud to build a cloud company.

When Andrew, PJ, and the early technical team were designing our platform, we designed around a series of cloud principles that distinguish our technology and execution from others in the market. This includes:

• Simple elegance of experience for customers interacting with the platform from a bone-dry simple UX, rich Restful APIs for DevOps automation and orchestration, and ground-breaking natural language security policy language.
• Taking advantages of the capabilities in modern operating systems and infrastructure rather than overlaying virtual appliances and kludgy client-server technologies that add complexity and reduce scale.
• Work anywhere on anything: private data centers and public clouds; physical servers, virtual machines, and containers.
• Distributed systems architecture that can scale from a few workloads to hundreds of thousands – no last-decade first packet to the controller, SDN-like architecture.
• Increasing number of large scale deployments of some of the largest data center and cloud environments in the world by Fortune 500 companies.

Late in life, the Irish Poet William Butler Yeats was reflecting on his life and captured what mattered the most to him in his poem The Municipal Gallery Revisited. Like Yeats, we feel honored whom we made it into this gallery with and share his thoughts:

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.”

We are stoked to be on the list and rush to the cloud future a day at a time.

Gra