Company: Rafay Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Nomination Submitted by: Bhava Communications
Company Description: Rafay enables enterprise platform teams to rapidly build automation for cloud environments and Kubernetes so their business can innovate, avoiding complex cloud infrastructure and operations. Platform teams rely on Rafay’s Environment Management and Kubernetes Management capabilities to build solutions for developers, empowering them to rapidly access cloud infrastructure in a self-serve fashion.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Business Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Cloud Platform
 Nomination Title: Rafay's Cloud Automation Platform [Product name has since changed to Rafay PaaS]
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR written answers to the questions for this category? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video.
N/A – selected written answers to questions.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this first question: If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:
Introduced on November 28 2023, Rafay launched its Cloud Automation Platform — the evolution of its Kubernetes Operations Platform.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this second question: Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 350 words):
Total 315 words used.
Cloud and business modernization have become business imperatives across organizations. Current cloud platforms deliver provisioning and lifecycle management, but lack the tools to manage across teams, applications or clouds at scale with the right level of control, autonomy and efficiency. In addition, platform engineers and developer teams struggle as the increasing pace of iteration across the business leads to complexity, sprawl and excess cost.
The industry's first and only product purpose-built for platform teams, Rafay’s Cloud Automation Platform (CAP) combines Rafay’s Kubernetes and Environment Management capabilities into a single platform to provide organizations with a comprehensive solution for building self-service automation to provision and manage the full stack (i.e., infrastructure, environments, clusters, applications, etc.) which is required to support modern applications — across any environment including public clouds, private data centers and the edge. It offers a game-changing automation solution for platform teams, bridging the complexity gap so businesses can focus on rapid innovation rather than cloud management.
Platform teams and developers no longer have to battle with building, integrating and supporting separate stovepipe services such as continuous deployment, logging, monitoring, policy management, authorization and backups because Rafay’s SaaS-based platform manages thousands of cloud environments and Kubernetes clusters with ease, standardizing configurations across all teams from a single console to provide on-demand access to cloud infrastructures. With Rafay, teams can build and deliver self-service automation for their top initiatives faster, including: AI and data science workbenches as a service, landing zones and environments as a service, and namespaces and clusters as a service. It also dramatically simplifies the management overhead of applications and services deployed at the edge, or in remote locations.
For example, the Cloud Automation Platform facilitates a way for platform teams to provide self-service infrastructure templates for generative AI use cases to developers and data scientists, while being able to effortlessly manage continuous operations of AI and machine learning (ML) applications.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this third question: Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable (up to 350 words):
Total 245 words used.
F2000 companies leverage Rafay's Cloud Automation Platform to simplify cloud and Kubernetes operations, enabling them to concentrate on modernization and innovation. Utilizing Rafay has resulted in deployments that are four times faster than previous processes, a 76% decrease in MTTR and an 88% quicker time to Kubernetes.
MoneyGram uses Rafay’s Cloud Automation Platform to streamline Kubernetes operations. “With the help of Rafay Systems and AWS, we are able to deliver new, innovative products and services to the global market faster and manage them all cost-effectively,” said MoneyGram CTO Joe Vaughan.
In addition, Verizon Business (VB) was looking to offer its customers a managed service to help deploy and operate containerized applications and Kubernetes across data centers, from cloud to edge. VB selected Rafay’s Cloud Automation Platform for MSPs product because it met all of VB’s requirements and allowed the company to bring a fully functional solution to market in under 12 months. According to Beth Cohen, cloud technology strategist at VB, “With the rise of edge computing, IT teams are looking for a means to deploy applications that allow them to co-manage the environment alongside a managed services provider that automates the management of all the associated IT infrastructure.”
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Rafay has a customer satisfaction score of 100, and in the past two consecutive years, the company achieved remarkable revenue growth, with a 50% increase in revenue in the first year followed by a 100% increase in the subsequent year.
- You have the option to answer this final question: Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 240 words used.
Rafay was recognized as a Cool Vendor in the 2023 Gartner Cool Vendors in Container Management Report and a Leader and Outperformer in the2023 GigaOm Radar Report for Managed Kubernetes. According to GigaOm analyst Justin Warren, Rafay offers “a robust and secure option for large-scale management of Kubernetes clusters. Not only does it provide excellent lifecycle management at scale and supports complex enterprise operational needs, it also offers fine-grained visibility into costs and enables support for multiple technologies alongside Kubernetes. This allows customers to migrate applications over time without having to split their attention with a bi-modal approach.”
Rafay’s Cloud Automation Platform was also recognized as a 2023 Tech Ascension Awards winner for the Best DevOps Automation Solution and a 2023 DevOps Dozen winner for Best Kubernetes Platform. These serve as a testament to Rafay’s ongoing dedication to giving platform teams the ability to enhance agility and speed, empower developers to be more productive and ultimately get apps up and running in the cloud faster and easier.
MoneyGram customer case study: Rafay’s Cloud Automation Platform allowed MoneyGram to create 100+ cluster blueprints to define, procure and enforce standard cluster configurations across development and production environments consisting of 20+ add-ons such as Splunk, New Relic and Nginx.
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