OpenStack startup Nebula goes out of business

One of the most commented news lately has been that Nebula, the open source cloud computing startup founded by Chris Kemp, former NASA CTO, shut down on April 1st, April Fools’ Day, what an unfortunate coincidence. Nebula has been one of the players in the OpenStack world since the very beginning.

The company published on its website an announcement where the management team broadcast about ceasing operations, thanking its team and clients, reassuring its customers that private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally but support will no longer be available, encouraging to shuffle alternatives such as HP, IBM and Red Hat.

The privately held and venture‐funded Nebula which started as NASA’s private Cloud-Computing initiative, always claimed to be one of the strongest members of the OpenStack project, as its co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Chris C. Kemp also co-founded OpenStack with the goal of creating and offering cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

On the official statement posted on its website, Nebula says the market still has to mature and startup condition does not allow the company to exhaust longer until this consolidation occurs.

What is actually true is that the OpenStack market is growing and evolving, probably Nebula’s capabilities were never considered fully mature or effective for the market, considering that Nebula solution took two years to develop, and at the end supposedly it was not what customers wanted.

We guess this is the nature’s law, when some of the players perform poorly they just cannot cope with the market. OpenStack market has still to fully evolve and we expect to see only few players to succeed in the business, especially small ones such as Mirantis and Piston, will need a solid and customer-focused strategy to survive the long period.