Mickos: Eucalyptus welcomes VMware's coming rival vCloud
Eucalyptus Systems -- with former mySQL CEO Marten Mickos now at the helm -- is readying for battle with VMware.
On Wednesday, the open source company will announce a major upgrade of its private cloud software that offers, for the first time, support for Windows images -- a necessity for any company targeting enterprise customers.
Version 2.0 of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is "more scalable, has features we didn't have before and now hosts Windows images. You can run Windows applications on Eucalyptus, a major new opening for new use cases than before," said Mickos, who took over as Eucalyptus' CEO last March. "It's obvious [you] need to do it at some point. We supported Linux and now there is support for Windows."
Mickos noted that Eucalyptus is preparing for its first real competition with the release of VMware's vCloud later this year. Yet, he is in no mood to pick a fight with a business partner and a rival that he says will end up generating more business for his latest enterprise.
"I have no doubt they will be successful in the market ... but the market is very large," he said, noting that VMware is one of Eucalyptus' virtualization partners. He also said Eucalyptus' open source model and support for Amazon's APIs (and multiple virtualization hypervisors) gives it appeal to customers that prefer standards.
Yet Mickos himself emphasized that the infrastructure-as-a-service software category is in its infancy. Unlike software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Eucalyptus offers software that allows enterprises to launch their own private clouds -- which allows them to harness all of their compute power and hardware assets and quickly provision applications and services.
Mickos, who sold mySQL to Sun for $1 billion, knows how to take an open source company from obscurity to the top of the commercial world. Still, Eucalyptus is pioneering a new category of software, he emphasizes.
"Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new .... mySQL came out with a product that was a known quantity. People knew what a relational database was," he noted. "We were David versus Goliath but cloud computing is new and we're the first vendor with a cloud computing platform available. We are the ones setting the standards."
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