Platform9, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup founded by former VMware engineers, is launching Tuesday with news that it's raised $4.5 million in Series A funding to help enterprises create their own Amazon-like clouds.

The funding comes from Redpoint Ventures.

Platform9’s claim is that it's cracked the operational obstacles to turning an arbitrary group of servers into a self-service private cloud. Such a cloud would be one way to combat the shadow IT that sprouts up when employees, craving agility and flexibility, go rogue to adopt public clouds such as Amazon Web Services.

The private cloud is set up through Platform9’s web site, which saves customers the work of setting up management and monitoring tools, the startup claims. That the entire operation is cloud-based and, apparently, self-service is the way Platform9 intends to stand out. Any number of cloud providers can extend a cloud into a customer's own data center; Platform9 appears to be saying it's made the whole process a lot easier.

Platform9 says its management tools will support any mix of KVM, Docker, and VMware vSphere environments; support for the latter two is still in development, the company tells Forbes.

As you might expect, Platform9 plans to show off its stuff at VMworld in San Francisco during the week of Aug. 25.

Finally, it's worth noting that the founding team has a collectively impressive history at VMware:

• Sirish Raghuram, CEO — "early engineer" at VMware, working on vSphere
• Madhura Maskasky, head of product management — seven-year engineer at VMware, where she "helped spearhead vSphere's transformation into a policy driven product suite"
• Roopak Parikh, head of engineering — a former VMware technical lead who helped ship Update Manager and vCloud Director
• Bich Le, chief architect — 14 years as a VMware principal engineer, following four years with HP Labs.

(Photo by William Murphy (Infomatique) on Flickr; Creative Commons 2.0 license. Image has been cropped.)