Year: 2010

Eucalyptus Systems is a US startup active on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market.
The company develops an open source management system, Eucalyptus, for virtual infrastructures that supports KVM.

Eucalyptus is available as a stand alone solution for on-premises deployments, but it’s also part of the Linux distribution Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), maintained by Canonical.
In March Dell signed an OEM agreement with Canonical to include UEC as part of its PowerEdge C servers.
In June Eucalyptus reached version 2.0 after a long development cycle, introducing commercial support for Windows guest operating systems.

Yesterday the company announced a second round of investment for $20M, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Benchmark Capital and BV Capital. Benchmark and BV already led the previous $5.5M round.

DocuSign is a US company focused on electronic signatures. It allows to upload on its servers a new document that must be signed, notifies the signers about the needed action, authenticates them, and confirms to all parties when the signature process is completed.
The whole process is completely web-based, and customers can access the DocuSign platform for document and signatures management through a PC, a tablet or a smartphone.

Last week the company announced an OEM partnership with Salesforce, to integrate the eSignature technology in CRM and the new Chatter service.
The integration with DocuSign will be also available for those customers that will create custom applications on the Salesforce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud: Force.com

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In May 2008 EMC launched a Storage-as-a-Service cloud computing offering dubbed Atmos onLine.

The platform, crafted to compete against Amazon S3, is powered by the Atmos technology (codenamed Maui): a storage system that scales up to multi-petabyte and that supports a global namespace, versioning, compression, deduplication, geographic distribution of information, objects replication, multi-tenancy and even API access.
Currently, the Atmos computing units feature Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs and up to 2TB disk drives, reaching 720TB of storage space per cabinet.

While Atmos is a technology for building a private storage cloud, Atmos onLine is its counter-part for public clouds, where EMC itself is the hosting provider.

EMC used to sell Atmos onLine resources for:

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ManageIQ is a well-known virtualization startup that launched in November 2007, with a major focus on platform management and orchestration.

Its flagship product, the Enterprise Virtualization Management (EVM) Suite, has been updated to version 2.3 in September 2009, introducing support for VMware vSphere 4.0.

EVM Suite includes four modules:

• Insight (for automated discovery, continuous tracking, and real-time monitoring combined with automatic, policy-based classification enable role-driven visibility)
• Control (for policy-based management and control of virtual machines applied at key operation, configuration, change, and VM lifecycle points as well as triggered by management events and administrative/operational activities)
• Automate (for virtual infrastructures automation through role-based, delegated administration, distributed operations, and self-service provisioning)
• Integrate (for integration with 3rd parties management systems)

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Last week the US startup CloudSwitch released version 1.0 of its Enterprise product.

CloudSwitch Enterprise is a management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms that converts, migrates and manages on-premises VMware and Xen virtual machines inside public clouds like Amazon EC2 and Terremark vCloud Express (by leveraging the VMware vCloud APIs).

The product acts as a sort of network bridge and management proxy in the hybrid architecture.
It establishes AES-256 encrypted channel to transfer the VMs. The it uses network fencing (which CloudSwitch calls Cloud Isolation Technology) to allow the remote management of VMs with the on-premises virtual infrastructure management tools.
The whole thing is then protected by a role-based access control (RBAC) layer for setting user/group permissions and controls.

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enStratus is a US company offering a cloud management platform that brokers different public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud architectures, including Amazon EC2 and S3, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, Rackspace, Cloud.com, ReliaCloud, Terremark, Microsoft Windows Azure and even the brand new Google Storage for Developers.

The product arrives as a 3-tier application that can stay hosted on enStratus servers or running on-premises inside the cloud infrastructure. The components are: the credentials system, the provisioning system and the console.

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Last week Zuora announced a version of its billing product Z-Commerce specifically tailored for cloud computing architectures.

The product is able to integrate with multiple IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud platforms, and meters the resource usage by multiple units of measure: terabyte stored, IP addresses, gigabyte transferred, CPU instances, application users, etc.
The metrics can be used into over 20 different pricing models, including on demand charging, reservation, location-based, off-peak pricing and more.
The engine then automatically generates and manages the invoices, including payment tracking, refunds, etc.

On top of that, Zuora can host the Z-Commerce storefront on behalf of the cloud provider, managing the users purchases and interacting with the cloud platform accordingly.

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During an interview with GigaOM at the Structure 2010 conference two weeks ago, the VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz revealed that his company is working with Amazon to deliver the tc Server and Spring framework, acquired from SpringSource in August 2009, on the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) platform.

The deal, similar to the one that VMware signed with SalesForce for VMForce.com and the one signed with Google for AppEngine, would turn EC2, which is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform into a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform, able to rival with Microsoft and its Azure offering.

According to The Register, Maritz expressed concerns about the VMware’s capability to evolve:

He also revealed he’s concerned VMware might miss out on the transition to cloud computing. According to Martiz, technology is easy to alter. It’s an inability to change business models that holds companies back. "I worry a lot about are we are the tail end of one generation [of computing] and the beginning of another," he said.

Yes, it’s true: virtualization.info already used the “Diane is back” theme in February, when the founder and former CEO of VMware sort of reappeared on the virtualization market as an investor of the startup Nicira.
But Nicira still is in stealth mode at this point and the Greene’s role in there will probably be all but operational.

She may be more active in another startup that emerges today from the stealth mode: Nimbula (formerly Benguela).
Greene will be a board member, advising an interesting team of former Amazon and VMware employees.

The company has been founded in 2008 by Chris Pinkham (CEO) and Willem van Biljon.
Pinkham is the former Vice President of Engineering at Amazon.com, where he spent five years, and one of the founders of Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). van Biljon was an Amazon Director, leading the EC2 development team, but in his career he founded Mosaic Software and managed it for over 11 years.

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