A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010 (subscription req’d), entitled “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of “where are they now.” Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here’s what has happened to the private companies and startups.

1. Abiquo: Abiquo has a new CEO, a tight partnership with NEC around selling to service providers and appears focused on the European market. The company raised about $14 million in 2010, but hasn’t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.
2. Appistry: Appistry made a huge shift in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications in areas such as life sciences, defense and financial services. Its biggest area of focus is genomics, where it is even developing new methods for analyzing genomes.
3. CA: CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010 — Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them — but it has been essentially silent since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.
4. Cloud.com: Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.
5. Elastra: Elastra is no more.
6. Enomaly: Enomaly’s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.
7. Eucalyptus Systems: If you ask CEO Marten Mickos, everything is great with Eucalyptus, and its whopping $55.5 million in venture capital (including a $30 million round in April 2012) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they’ll likely tell a different story.
8. GigaSpaces: GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term “private cloud.” It has always been much more about its in-memory data grid tech and apps that need dynamic scalability, although it does now offer a Platform-as-a-Service product that’s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.
9. Joyent: Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company — which has raised an incredible $115 million — is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings and has landed some big-name users.
10. Librato: Librato looks to have abandoned its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff — sensors, server use, whatever.  It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.
11. LongJump: In hindsight, LongJump’s business was not actually a great fit for that 2010 report, and its business appears about the same: you build apps in a user-friendly setting and they can run on LongJump’s infrastructure or your own.
12. Morphlabs: Morphlabs is the master of pivots, although it’s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform called mCloud Osmium in February.
13. Nimbula: Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an “acquihire” situation, although neither company will comment on the details.
14. Platform Computing: IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011 and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that’s a bad thing — Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I’d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.
15. Virtustream: Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010 (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It’s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers’ data centers.
16. Voxel: Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million by managed hosting provider Internap in January 2012.

OpenStack is what happened to the private cloud market and forced so many acquisitions, pivots and even one closure. Users, investors and everyone, really, were waiting for some promise of cloud interoperability and portability (aka something other than Amazon, VMware or Microsoft) and OpenStack delivered it. Further, for the service provider community — which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception — OpenStack provided a relatively engineering-free path to public cloud offerings (compared with building their own from scratch, that is) without fear of being at the mercy of a startup that might fold tomorrow and take its core technology with it.

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward “private cloud” in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We’ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack to some degree — Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game thanks to OpenStack.

For buyers, a large, well-heeled and deep-pocketed community has to be more appealing than a disparate collection of startups all doing their own thing.

L to R: Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Chris Kemp of Nebula (an OpenStack startup) and Sameer Dholakia of Citrix at Structure 2012.
(c) Pinar Ozger

Who’s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services — all companies with their own intellectual property, huge user bases and lots of money to back their visions. They all also have strong public cloud connections (some, obviously, stronger than others).

The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They’ve been big on engineering, won major customers early on and raised a lot of money to help them maintain through any tough times. All but Cloud.com, now part of Citrix, have a very prominent public cloud component, too — which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment — but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.

All of the aforementioned companies are/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we’re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry. Providers that weren’t part of that community are jumping on board, and it’s just a few established holdovers that look like they’ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry’s coattails.

Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You’re either really early and really good, or you wait for an open source project — OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. — and try to build on that. There’s following fast, and there’s following smart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka.

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Details on the acquisition are still sparse (trust us, though, we’ll find them), but here’s the official statement from the Oracle website:

On March 13, 2013, Oracle announced it has agreed to acquire Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software. Nimbula’s technology helps companies manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments. Nimbula’s product is complementary to Oracle, and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2013.

It’s difficult to say at this point what inspired the deal, but my early assumption is that it’s a win-win. Oracle currently has a cloud computing strategy that’s questionable at best, and its private-cloud strategy seems hinged on selling big, expensive, over-engineered systems with some legacy Sun Microsystems and Oracle software cobbled together to make them, cloudy.

Nimbula co-founder Chris Pinkham (center) at Structure 2011.

Nimbula was on the scene early and, from all accounts, built a good product, but appears to have succumbed to a lackluster private-cloud buying market. It has a handful of publicly named customers, including Russian search engine giant Yandex, but like so many other private-cloud startups, it might have fallen victim to market confusion (i.e., “Can’t we just keep buying VMware?”) and an industry consensus around OpenStack as the private-cloud savior. Indeed, last year, Nimbula made a strong pivot and actually began rebuilding itself as an OpenStack distribution.

Maybe Oracle just needed some real cloud talent and/or software and Nimbula just needed a buyer. At any rate, we’ve reached out to Nimbula, Oracle others for comment and will update this story as we hear back.

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OpenCenter aims to make it easier for enterprises to automate rollout of updates and deploy their cloud in the first place.  ”Deploying high-availability used to take a lot of manual steps but we can now point and click to do that in OpenCenter,” said Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for Rackspace. OpenCenter, he said, is part of an overall operations “fabric” that will let us roll things out faster, provide continuous deployment and updates right into the private cloud.

The OpenCenter code is free and available under the Apache 2 license.

More host operating systems to choose from

The new private cloud option utilizes OpenStack’s Folsom code base and will be updated to the newer Grizzly release when it comes out next month. Rackspace said its public cloud already uses Grizzly. Also with this private cloud release, customers can choose between Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS as their host operating system. In the previous private cloud, Ubuntu was the default host OS.

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The company calls its product the AppFabric, and it’s essentially a software development kit and a set of high-level APIs sitting above a fabric layer that connects to all of a company’s various Hadoop clusters. Co-founder and CEO Todd Papaioannou, former entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures and VP and chief cloud architect at Yahoo, says Continuuity wants to make it easy for developers at fast-follower companies to build big data applications without having to learn Hadoop’s low-level APIs and the general complexity of the distributed framework. Very few people, he said, really want to be part of the ”home-brew computing club experience.”

In some ways, Continuuity is trying to do for big data what Heroku and other PaaS providers have done for web applications. There’s a drag-and-drop user interface, an integrated developer environment to make development easy on a laptop before pushing an application into production, and resources scale elastically.  Papaioannou said developers get a UI for DevOps, as well, and can connect Continuuity apps with server-side web apps wherever they’re hosted, even on other PaaS offerings.

Presently, Continuuity is available in private beta for its single-node developer version and private cloud version. It expects a public cloud version will be available at some point in 2013. The platform currently supports Java applications only — a natural first step given that Hadoop is written in Java — but Papaioannou said Continuuity plans to support other languages going forward.

Papaioannou’s fellow co-founder, Jonathan Gray, who was integral in building Facebook’s Messaging and Puma analytics applications on top of the Hadoop-based HBase database, says even early big data adopters might be interested in what Continuuity is selling. For example, he explained, a company like Facebook will have separate clusters for data warehousing, for HBase and for caching. A product like AppFabric would abstract the differences between those various systems and allow developers to easily write applications connecting to any or all of them.

Even if they’ve made it easy for non-engineer developers to write batch-processing jobs (like Facebook has with Hive for Hadoop), both Gray and Papaioannou say large companies can have hard time giving developers even more functionality. AppFabric might let developers create streaming or transactional apps, too, without requiring a whole new set of internally developed tools.

Really, Papaioannou says, the idea behind a PaaS for big data is no different than that behind platforms as a service, generally. The key question is: “Can a programmer sit down in an afternoon and develop something he can take to his boss?” Any company that can really make this happen for Hadoop — be it Continuuity, Infochimps, Mortar Data or whomever — should be in a good position to grow. Hadoop skills are in high demand but short supply, and there are plenty of developers waiting to get their hands on all that data-processing power.

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So what are they?

• Public cloud – The only “real” cloud as someone like Werner Vogel of Amazon would say
• Private cloud – An on-site or hosted private cloud-capable environment
• Actual cloud -The set of strategies, processes, people and technologies that enable business agility, improved resource management, and faster time to market (among other things). The actual cloud is the real world amalgamation that users end up with and may consist of both or one of the above.

As the idea for this blog was first racing through my mind thought getting feedback on the term cloud from some of my friends would be a great way to further illuminate the disparity of thought on the subject of cloud. As you can see from the tweets and quotes below, each has their own take on the idea of “what is cloud, really?”

Joe Weinman, a SVP at Telx and author of the just-released Cloudonomics defines “cloud” via a retronym: C.L.O.U.D.: a Common, Location-independent, Online, Utility, on-Demand service. He argues that each of these properties generates statistically quantifiable economic value; for example, common resources lead to increased utilization when demands are independent. Such approaches, he argues, provide a sounder basis for cloud decision-making than hand waving.

Others were less scientific, such as Simon Wardley a lead researcher at the Leading Edge Forum, who tweeted: “IMHO – Cloud is a muppet marketing term used to window dress computer utilities as something else so other muppets pay more”

False arguments on both sides of what cloud is or isn’t

The cloud industry benefits from you as the customer being confused by the noise. Each side of the cloud debate is trying to work on your fears that you might be buying into something that’s not secure, will cost too much, or will lock you in etc. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t real cloudwashing going on, but this is where as the customer you need to be clear about what the objectives are. If what you’re buying meets or exceeds them, then it’s good enough. So you can safely ignore the following false arguments:

• Private cloud isn’t real because it can’t possibly be as cost-effective as a public utility type offering such as those from Rackspace, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Profitbricks, Zumaysys, etc.
• Public cloud is not secure enough
• Private cloud will never scale infinitely and therefore isn’t really cloud
• Public cloud is more expensive
• Private cloud is just a stack of stuff being sold to you by the big vendors
• Public cloud isn’t dependable
• Private cloud software isn’t mature enough
• Public cloud will lock you in to a provider
• Private cloud is just more hardware and software lock in

While all of the above statements are “false” in the right context, they can be true in others. The sad truth is that it’s definitely a caveat emptor market for the cloud service/solution buyer.

Why the what doesn’t matter

When someone aks, “What cloud are you using?”, “Who cares,” should be the answer. What’s important is what you’re doing, not what you used to do it. We’ve been subjected to alternate technologies at every layer of the IT stack for the last 30 years, yet strangely we’re not all on one OS, one storage type, one middleware solution, or one database. As I’ve stated before, IT by its very nature provides us with a painter’s palette of opportunities. What’s important is how you utilize that pallet, not whether you use a specific type of paint.

The correct question should be how are you creating opportunity, or how are you enabling agility. In general the least important addition to your operational model should be the technologies you’ve added. If you’ve added the technology pieces, but haven’t changed your operation model and realigned your business and IT staff, then the tech just doesn’t matter. If you built a cloud based on Captain Crunch and bailing wire, then great, you’ve got a cloud, as long as it’s solving the problems you needed solved and enabling the agility and opportunity you expected. The why of the activity should always be the most important point, because it will drive the how.

Chose the actual cloud

When you’ve created a cloud oriented organizational model, then the technology that supports it is but an enabler. If you can solve the problem most effectively by cobbling something together yourself with all commodity and opensource then you should. However, if you can reach your objectives more quickly or cost effectively by buying a pre-packaged “cloud” offering or using a global public cloud service, then that’s where you should go. The trick is the organizational design. Without proper design you will fail the why process and you’ll be forever fighting ownership disease. And ownership disease can stall or even kill some of your best opportunities because someone’s comfort or skill is being accommodated at a higher priority than the business opportunity.

So get off the cloud bandwagon and get on the actual cloud thought process. Consider what opportunities you’re trying to create and evaluate your cloud or infrastructure solution options based on best fit, as you would with any IT solution. Many of us like to go on for hours about what the pure cloud is supposed to be, but it’s just not an important argument. As long as you have a clear sense of what the technology solution you’re selecting can enable, and it satisfies your requirements, then don’t wait for someone to call it a real cloud, just start using it.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Cup image courtesy of Shutterstock user Levent Konuck. Palette image courtesy of Flickr user Sultry: New in New Hampshire!

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Charles Dickens (who may be rolling in his grave) was right. When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems to be no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private Cloud and legacy IT are here to stay.

Underlying IT strategy considerations (What’s good for you)

Cloud computing is supposed to save us money, and most would argue that it can. Cloud computing is also supposed to provide agility and flexibility in how you deploy and manage your IT solutions, enabling improved business capabilities. The problem is that depending on what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, saving money could be the only reason for adopting or not a reason at all.

If savings was the motivation for moving services to the cloud I might argue that depending on the depth and breadth of adoption you could be using the wrong decision drivers. In other words, how often are major shifts in IT done with savings in IT as the “why”? Savings is the outcome of the “why.”

Personally, I always look for ways to make IT more cost effective and efficient, but not at the expense of real progress. If you’re spending your time focused on cost savings and efficiency as the why then you’re likely missing greater opportunities for adding business value. As I’ve said before, you must get away from thinking of IT as a tool to use to reduce the cost of IT.

How to know if the public cloud is your best bet.

• Limited exposure to heavy infrastructure investments like mainframes and enterprise applications
• IT staff are more likely to have been brought up in the days of rapid development, virtualization automation and services on demand
• More accepting of risk to availability or supportability of your environments (more open to “open source”)
• In a smaller business there tends to be greater flexibility and agility in decision making
• Enterprises that have new application requirements should look at all options (SaaS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, etc.). Time to market, skills and costs should be the deciding factor, not dogma.
• The above characteristics lend themselves to allowing a company to go whole hog into a new IT strategy and to accept risks where more established enterprises can’t or won’t. Generally smaller companies and younger companies will take this risk.
• The staff is much less likely to feel emotional attachment to a SAN or to working on servers and are therefore less likely to feel threatened by looking to an external provider.

So who wants to stick with private cloud?

• Companies with a decade plus of investment in IT staff, infrastructure and enterprise applications
• Those in industries where regulatory and financial controls are stricter, more comprehensive and carry greater risk when failure occurs
• CIOs working at places where business change takes much longer and acceptance for risk to the status quo is much lower
• Places that have dedicated staffing for very specific roles, which makes it harder to unify quickly around a major change to infrastructure or applications
• Businesses with a much larger infrastructure base, allowing for deeper staff knowledge and improved economies of scale

The characteristics of a large enterprise mean that many investments in IT have consequences that are measured in the $100s of millions. Any short term investment in hardware or private cloud solutions is immaterial to the greater opportunity for the company. This doesn’t mean that a large enterprise can’t or shouldn’t look to use public cloud where it makes sense, but it does mean that they don’t have to in order to be competitive. In the end, very few companies will ever fail because their infrastructure cost area little higher. However, they could fail if their infrastructure doesn’t protect the business or respond appropriately to need.

Your mileage may vary

Enterprises can’t and won’t just dump expensive and critical legacy environments so they can move something to public or private cloud. Smaller businesses can now adopt technologies, applications and distributed infrastructure in ways that were formerly only available to much larger organizations. We will have a noisy cloud technology market for some time to come and the split of cloud computing models means that there will be room for everyone.

So depending on where you sit the market could look great or scary. It could look like it’s not really changing for the better, or it could look like it’s moving too fast. However, the fact is that change to a cloud operating model is happening and competition will be the deciding factor. Companies will adopt those strategies that offer them the best combination of agility, and cost, while appropriately addressing their level of risk tolerance.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user piermario; Server photo courtesy of Flickr user Paul Hammond; Odometer photo courtesy of Flickr user  quasireversible.

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The availability of both private and public cloud infrastructure will enable customers who want to run some workloads on an internal or private cloud and others on an external cloud to do so using the same basic infrastructure.

There is big interest and probably considerable demand for such hybrid cloud implementations that let companies keep sensitive workloads inside their firewalls but allows easy expansion into a public cloud as needed.

OneID is an example. The company, a Rackspace customer, offers a secure way for users to make payments online. Bobby Beckmann, VP of engineering there, loves the idea of hybrid cloud. In a recent interview said he loves what cloud can do — let you spin up machines for fast, on-demand CPU power.  But …”I wasn’t ready to give up control over our speed of accessing storage.  Even with Amazon EC2, I/O is a bottleneck because you’re competing with other VMs. I also wanted my own real hardware load balancer and firewall. We need to be PCI compliant and to do that we need tight control over devices.”

Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace’s private cloud business, tells us via email:

“We believe that the majority of our customers and cloud users will be running hybrid cloud environments for a long time. Today’s announcement allows businesses to utilize their existing investment in their own data center resources to run an open cloud solution for additional control and customization and also take advantage of Rackspace’s datacenter options.”

OpenStack activity is heating up — earlier this week Red Hat posted a preview to its OpenStack cloud implementation although it will not be generally available until next year.

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Witness Tuesday’s news that private-cloud startup Nimbula worked with MapR Technologies to put MapR’s Hadoop distribution on Nimbula’s private cloud infrastructure. The resulting offering pairs Nimbula Director – with its management and scaling capabilities – with MapR’s high-speed Hadoop product, the two companies said.

The promised benefit is that Nimbula brings its elastic, multi-tenant technology, Hadoop brings its big data capabilities, and together they offer an infrastructure that promises to be easier to scale and manage by mere mortals.

According to the company’s statement about the news:

Nimbula Director … takes bare metal servers with local disks and turns them into a large multi-tenant pool of compute with a self-service provisioning interface enabling the repeated provisioning and deprovisioning of Hadoop and non-Hadoop workloads. The automation of the Hadoop services from MapR and the automation of the underlying instances from Nimbula work together to maintain a fully-functional and highly-available Hadoop cluster.

VMware’s plan for highly available Hadoop

Making Hadoop more manageable, more available and more flexible is a huge opportunity and one that is being attacked by many tech companies. VMware’s Serengeti project  aims to put Hadoop on VMware’s vSphere hypervisor, as Derrick Harris reported in June.

And MapR is definitely playing the field, trying to entrench its Hadoop distribution on as many cloud platforms as possible — it already has partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, as well.

One thing seems clear: The company or companies that can solve the problem of making big data jobs less of a big management problem, are in for a lot of business.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user 1971yes.

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VMware CEO Paul Maritz

Updated: VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. DynamicOps began as a virtualization-management vendor, but ventured into the private-cloud space in 2010 and later entered an OEM deal with Dell to serve as the self-service component of Dell’s Virtual Integrated System software suite.

VMware clearly expects DynamicOps to let the virtualization leader keep its upper hand as commodization of and diversification in the hypervisor space forces VMware to shift its pricing model away from licensing virtual machines. From the press release announcing the acquisition:

VMware believes that customers will benefit most by a standardized architecture, but will build solutions that make it easy for customers to choose the model that best works for their needs, including heterogeneous environments/management. … DynamicOps builds on the capabilities of vCloud Director by enabling customers to consume multi-cloud resources (e.g., physical environments, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2).

The acquisition (rumors of which have been floating around for months) makes a lot of sense given VMware’s push up the stack from being a provider of server virtualization to being the management layer for the software-defined data center. The company needs to care a lot less about what’s running at the infrastructure level and a lot more about enabling a new class of applications to run dynamically atop those resources. DynamicOps furthers this vision by opening VMware’s doors to customers running competitive virtualization software and using Amazon’s cloud that competes with VMware’s vCloud strategy.

Update: Deals of the term were undisclosed, although sources tell me the sale price was between $100 million and $150 million, and probably closer to the top half of that range. DynamicOps had raised $16.3 million in venture capital, including $5.3 million from Intel Capital in September 2011 and $11 million from Sierra Ventures, Next World Capital and investment bank Credit Suisse in February 2011.

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Eucalyptus, the cloud platform company that wants to bridge corporate private clouds to the Amazon cloud, is updating its platform software to bring it more in line with the open source model.

CEO Marten Mickos said the latest release of the Eucalyptus cloud platform cements its status as a champion of open source development but does not do much to further the promise of Amazon API compatibility. That will come in the 3.2 release due at the end of the year, he said.

“The 3.1 release marks our full commitment to open source. We did away with different editions — now it’s just the Eucalyptus cloud platform all free and open source, all hosted on Github. Not just the code contributions but the bug databases, and we’ve made it easy to integrate with other products, easier to build plug-ins and tools atop our platform,” Mickos told me last week.

Functionally, the company also improved performance, stability and added a new FastStart process to speed up private cloud deployments. The company will provide plug-ins and support for paying subscribers. “If you want to run this integrated with VMware you need plug-in and you’ll pay for that but it’s not a separate edition,” he said.

The company made a big splash in March when it announced — with Amazon —  that it would support of Amazon’s key APIs, easing interoperability between a business’s internal private cloud and Amazon’s public cloud. Specifically it will support the Amazon EC2, S3, EBS and IAM (identity and access management) APIs, but most of that work won’t surface until release 3.2 due at the end of the year, Mickos said.

The Amazon API hue and cry

Given the popularity of the Amazon public cloud model with developers and consumers (if not all IT departments) and that private cloud is the preferred mode of cloud computing for IT pros, technologies that bridge those worlds safely and efficiently could be much in demand.  The Eucalyptus-Amazon pairing was thus been viewed by many as a way to make Amazon Web Services palatable to business accounts and a way for Eucalyptus to bask in the reflected glow of Amazon’s success. It was also seen as a counter move to the OpenStack forces including Rackspace lining up around that technology for private and public cloud deployment.

But the whole notion of cloning or relying on Amazon APIs is controversial. Last week John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, warned attendees of the Open Data Center Alliance Forecast Conference that cloning Amazon’s APIs is a continuous game of catch-up, not a way to innovate. “The idea that cloning the Amazon API will solve everything is ridiculous,” he said.

Mickos last week acknowledged the controversy, but said Eucalyptus is being pragmatic. “Look, it’s not specifically important to be compatible with Amazon, it’s important to be compatible with the leading API in the public cloud space. If and when there’s another major standard, we will support that as well,” Mickos said.

Expect more debate around the importance of Amazon API compatibility at this week’s GigaOM Structure show where Rackspace President Lew Moorman and Amazon Web Services’ CTO Werner Vogels will both speak.

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