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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• EMC Greenplum lays down the SQL-on-Hadoop gauntlet: The company’s new Pivotal HD Hadoop distribution fuses its analytic database technology with Hadoop to create a single data store for everything. Greenplum co-founder Scott Yara claims the data warehouse — where Greenplum got its start — is the new mainframe.
• Intel does Hadoop: Intel’s Hadoop distribution is interesting for so many reasons, but the biggest might be the sense that it’s an attempt to keep x86 relevant as ARM pushers pursue big data workloads. Among Intel’s hardware partners are Cray, SuperMicro and Cisco.

• How Friendster died and Facebook might die: Researchers studied the collapse of Friendster and decided that a dimished cost-benefit analysis and users’ average number of friends contributed to its demise. The fewer friends, the more influential one friend’s decision to quit. And people quit when services begin to suck.
• Using memristors to recreate the brain: This is a heady research project based on the theory that memristors are similar enough to synapses in the human brain that they could help create an artificial brain. Memristors are a nanotechnology that allow electrical currents to pass between circuits based on the past currents they have  transmitted.
• MapR and Google in a high-performance lovefest: MapR is all about faster Hadoop, and Google is all about touting how great its Compute Engine cloud is for high-performance job. A MinuteSort benchmark test of MapR on Compute Engine bested the previous record (and crushed the previous Hadoop record for MinuteSort) — and on standard cloud servers, no less.
• LinkedIn open sources Databus: Databus is LinkedIn’s tool for updating changes in data between its various storage systems and applications at high speed. It could be pretty valuable, and I assume it’s something LinkedIn’s Bhaskar Ghosh will discuss during our guru panel at Structure: Data next month.

• Continuuity free beta now open to the public: Continuuity is the startup from former Yahoo VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray that’s building a platform as a service for developing big data applications. On Wednesday, it opened a beta version to developers who want to test the experience of building Hadoop applications on the cloud-based platform.
• Placed Analytics shows who shops in stores but buys online: This is the latest piece of research from Placed, a startup tracking mobile phone data to determine what businesses people like to visit, or at least hang out near. This report highlights which businesses are most at risk from consumers viewing products in their stores and then buying them on Amazon.
• IBM, South Korea and weather predictions:Weather forecasting has always been a good area for big data and high-performance computing, so this use case is pretty much straight data porn. From the press release: “IBM has provided KMA and NMSC with the latest IBM storage technologies capable of recording 20 gigabytes (equivalent to 400,000 web pages) of data per second … [w]ith a total storage capacity of 9.3 petabytes.”
• Virtustream using Druid for cloud analytics service: Virtustream is dead serious about staking its claim as theenterprise cloud provider, and this partnership with Metamarkets (see disclosure) is a good way to expand its reach into big data applications. Essentially, Metamarkets will provide consulting services for companies wanting to build apps atop Hadoop and Druid, the in-memory analytic database that Metamarkets created.

In addition to LinkedIn’s Ghosh, the founders of Placed, Continuuity and Metamarkets will all be on stage at Structure: Data talking about everything from building Hadoop applications, to managing massive data infrastructure to the new era of web privacy, so please come come and watch.

Disclosure: Metamarkets is a portfolio company of True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM. Om Malik is also a venture partner at True.

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Virtustream’s xStream cloud platform is designed for mission-critical and heavy-duty enterprise applications such as SAP. The company touts big-name customers such as Pizza Hut, Domino Sugar and Intel, as well as gaming startup Digital Chocolate. Recently, Virtustream upped its enterprise (and government) appeal by announcing FISMA Moderate certification, a designation that underscores the cloud’s security protocol, even if FISMA is only applicable (and with regard to cloud computing, questionably so) to government agencies.

There is plenty competition for those enterprise cloud workloads, though, including from Amazon Web Services, Terremark/Verizon, IBM, GoGrid, Tier 3 and the entire VMware vCloud ecosystem. To its credit, Virtustream is striving to distinguish itself with a consumption-based pricing scheme as well as a mix of public, private and virtual private offerings. The company recently bought cloud computing pioneer Enomaly in order to work its SpotCloud technology into a federated platform for letting Virtustream customers buy and sell excess capacity among one another.

There isn’t a lot of money floating around to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service companies — it’s a capital-intensive business compared to software as a service, and the competition is both established and huge — so Virtustream’s ability to keep raising money is indicative of its promise. It will have to keep on its toes, though, because there’s no shortage of innovation in the cloud world, and everyone is working overtime on features to lure in those lucrative enterprise customers.

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It’s the latter effort that fueled Virtustream’s desire to buy Enomaly, Virtustream CEO Rodney Rogers told me. His company, which offers an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud tuned for enterprise applications such as SAP, recently productized its management platform in the form of private-cloud software. He thinks SpotCloud includes some valuable code that will help Virtustream build its own federated cloud ecosystem.

“I think everybody is going to be racing toward some sort of federation solution here in the next few years,” Rogers said. The idea makes sense because it gives buyers an option to buy discounted resources (a la Amazon’s Spot Pricing instances) and gives sellers the ability to recoup sunk costs they don’t need.

That effort, called the xStream Exchange, should be ready in late-2012 or early 2013, after Virtustream is able to integrate the SpotCloud code and make some needed security upgrades. Virtustream CTO Kevin Reid said the xStream Exchange will initially include only Virtustream customers with excess private or public cloud capacity, but it could expand to trusted third-party service providers and possibly individual organizations over time. He thinks his company’s concept of infrastructure units — which it defines as “an extensible container of compute, memory, bandwidth and IOPS, smaller than a virtual machine” — will provide a better cloud currency than the standard server-based allocation model.

Rogers added that Enomaly’s success in establishing a customer base and a general presence in China was also very appealing. A large portion of Virtustream’s customers are Fortune 500 companies, and they have labor forces in China that they would like to support locally rather than regionally, he said. Virtustream already has a data center presence in Southeast Asia.

Rogers spent time in China recently working on some partnership deals, and says it’s “absolutely amazing the scale of what’s being developed over there” in terms of infrastructure and government support.

Reuven Cohen

However, there is a different way of doing business in China, something Enomaly Founder and CTO Reuven Cohen knows well, and which could prove valuable depending on what role he takes at Virtustream. He likens Chinese business to a 1950s Mad Men-style environment, where the guy sitting next to you in the boardroom is smoking a cigarette and drinking scotch, and where personal relationships are king. Enomaly is probably better known in China than it is in North America, Cohen said.

As for Enomaly’s products, Rogers said Virtustream will continue to support their current versions, but their primary value is in the form of intellectual property to bolster Virtustream’s offerings.

I asked Cohen if he’s sad to see his SpotCloud and Elastic Computing Platform products go, for all intents and purposes, but he said he’s happy with the result. “As an entrepreneur, you’re building a company for value and to have a good exit,” he said, adding that it was eight years’ worth of good code that made his company sellable.

Still, timing is everything in IT, and Cohen says he has a “chronic weakness toward being early.” Some later cloud startups such as Cloud.com (now part of Citrix ) and Eucalyptus received much more attention, despite Cohen’s role as one of the early cloud evangelists. Being based in Canada and not raising venture capital didn’t help, either, but Cohen said he learned some things to do different next time.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user AndyFitz.

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Alfred Tsai, Digital Chocolate’s director of global IT and network operations, told me the company was operating entirely in Amazon Web Services, but decided to bring some games back in-house when performance issues got to be too much. AWS’s database servers were plenty robust, he explained, but the backend network was just too slow. Digital Chocolate couldn’t utilize the database servers to their maximum performance because the network couldn’t keep up with the transaction volume.

Big Games Come Home

Now, Digital Chocolate still launches new games on AWS, but it runs its most-popular games in-house. It relies on a 10 GbE network backbone, as well as storage appliances from a startup company called Tintri. Tintri’s VMstore appliance mixes solid-state and hard disk drives to balance performance and cost, and is designed specifically for virtualized environments. Tsai said Digital Chocolate is still experiencing performance levels around 50,000 IOPS with its Tintri boxes, despite the fact that it has yet to upgrade from the beta version of the product.

One of the big benefits, he said, is that Tintri lets Digital Chocolate manage its entire set of gaming data as one big data store rather than having to break it up into multiple volumes. Each Tintri box provides 8.5TB of capacity that act as a single datastore, which Tsai said is far more than what VMware supports using typical virtualized SAN storage. Additionally, because Tintri monitors storage performance per VM, Tsai said it lets Digital Chocolate better architect games to run on its internal infrastructure.

For those curious about Tintri, it’s backed by NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and was founded by Kieran Harty, who led all desktop and server research and product development at VMware from 1999 through 2006.

Long way from a Z-Cloud

Meanwhile, Tsai acknowledges that Digital Chocolate has a way to go before it has a hybrid cloud system as apparently seamless as Zynga’s Z Cloud, but it’s working toward such a setup.

He also noted that Digital Chocolate is experimenting heavily with other cloud providers in the hopes of achieving more resiliency. AWS is a great short-term replacement for physical hardware, he said, but it’s prone to outages, particularly its Elastic Block Storage service, which Tintri Digital Chocolate uses. EBS was the cause of AWS’s four-day outage in April that made national headlines.

One of the cloud providers Tsai is particularly impressed with is Virtustream. AWS launched its Direct Connect feature yesterday that provides direct connections between Equinix and AWS data centers, but, Tsai said, Digital Chocolate worked with Virtustream to run a 20-Gigabit pipe from the cloud provider’s East Coast data center to Digital Chocolate’s colocation cage in San Francisco. He said the support and costs are big improvements over AWS, too.

And Virtustream is working with RightScale and developing its own API, Tsai explained, which will make the easier to manage. If you’ll recall, RightScale is the middle man for Zynga’s cloud infrastructure, providing a uniform management interface for its AWS- and Cloud.com-based resources. APIs let customers write applications that can make calls directly to the cloud infrastructure to perform certain tasks.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Bill Ward’s brickpile.

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