VMOps, a two year old cloud software company that lets companies create the equivalent of the Amazon Elastic Computing service (EC2) with commodity hardware, is rebranding itself as Cloud.Com.
Its Cloud Management Server and Multitenant Hypervisor will now be called the CloudStack, and most of it will be available under the GPLv3 while a small portion (2%, the company said) is being held out under a commercial license.
CNET’s own Dave Rosenberg was told that in addition to letting companies define resources as clouds, Cloud.com will also let Web hosts and other service providers sell clouds under the new buzzword Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS).
Cloud.com’s own strategy has it as a direct competitor to Amazon, along with Opsource, but it might also be proper to consider Eucalyptus and VMWare’s vCloud as direct competitors.
The new name and strategy comes three months after the company closed an $11 million financing round headed by Index Ventures.
Two questions occur:
- Nice buzzword you bought there, how much did it cost? Hard to believe a URL like cloud.com was just sitting at Network Solutions. It is a much cooler name though. What would you rather have on your business card, VMOps or Cloud.com?
- How open source are you when a portion of your software is being kept out of open source and placed under a commercial license? Sure, you told Rosenberg it was 2%, but a key and lock are just 2% of a door.
Personally I’m waiting for someone to come out with software that makes you safe under the cloud and call it Umbrella Software. The URL is currently held by a contract programmer out of Auckland, New Zealand.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
