This was a busy week for Cloud.com. The company came out of stealth mode, changed its name from VMOps to Cloud.com, raised an $11 million Series B round of funding with a new lead investor Index Ventures, and launched a new solution called CloudStack, which is described as a comprehensive open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management, and configuration of multitier and multitenant private and public cloud services for enterprises and service providers.
More and more organizations are looking to the cloud to provide answer for many of their IT initiatives. However, cloud technologies and use cases are fast changing and quickly evolving, so companies would do well to plan things out and possibly take a heterogeneous and open approach when designing their strategy. Companies may start out sticking their big toe in the water by building out a private cloud solution, and then migrate or span over into a public cloud down the road.
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Cloud.com's CloudStack offering is an open source solution, but is not limited to open source virtualization hypervisors. Sure, it supports Xen and KVM, but it also supports VMware out of the box. The infrastructure as a service solution comes in three distinct products: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition, and CloudStack Community Edition. And through the implementation of common cloud frameworks like the Amazon Web Services API, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and VMware vCloud initiative, Cloud.com provides an open, hybrid environment that interoperates with a user's existing cloud initiatives.
This week, I had the chance to speak with Peder Ulander, the CMO at Cloud.com, to find out how they look at the cloud and how open source technologies could play a major role in making the cloud possible.
InfoWorld: There's a lot of news lately around the cloud computing market. Why do you believe it is an important trend, and can you talk about some of the benefits?
Ulander: The cloud computing industry is still very much an emerging market, but one that is growing rapidly. Global service providers and enterprise IT teams are turning toward the cloud for two distinct reasons. Service providers are looking to offer cloudlike services to increase revenue opportunities while enterprise IT teams are looking to deploy private clouds to increase both the efficiency of IT operations as well as to provide the elastic computing environments users are demanding.