Infrastructure as a Service

For being only three years old, Eucalyptus has already made quite a splash in the Infrastructure as a Service market, particularly since over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds were started all over the world including more than 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies.

But its Cinderella story may be a bit different than one would expect.

Started as an open source research project out of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Eucalyptus was eventually molded to offer one of the first – at that time – on-premise private cloud platforms. Now, the company is considered one of the most widely adopted private cloud platforms in the market.

“We are the most widely deployed on-premise Infrastructure as a Service platform,” David P. Butler, vice president of marketing at Eucalyptus, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo West 2011 earlier this month. “Our value proposition is that we are an out-of-the-box platform ready to go for production… Its enterprise ready, it’s being used and deployed more than anybody, and it’s an early platform that’s ready to be used in the market.”

Today, Eucalyptus aims to provide IT organizations in enterprises, government agencies, Web and mobile businesses, and industry partners a software platform for on-premise Infrastructure as a Service clouds.

According to Butler, one of the main ways that the company sets itself apart in the industry is its ability to offer both public and private cloud services. Moreover, because Eucalyptus started out from the beginning using Amazon’s API, images that are created on Amazon can run on Eucalyptus and vice versa. Therefore, companies that are interested in transitioning from Amazon’s public cloud deployment to private cloud can turn to Eucalyptus because “we are the fastest way to do it and very scalable,” Butler said.

“Companies that want to move quickly and don’t want to build their own cloud platform will get a lot of value out of our product,” Butler said.

“Our edge comes from staying focused and having production deployments; there’s many people that don’t have any production deployments and some that don’t have any customers,” he added. “We are pretty sure we have more production deployments then all of our competitors. Some of the competition is just getting started in this space, and our experience and breadth of use is very unique in the market.”

In an effort to remain competitive in the market, Eucalyptus is constantly revisiting its software and updating the platform. This summer, the company introduced Eucalyptus 3, the third generation of the Eucalyptus on-premise Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing software. Eucalyptus 3 is designed to be the most comprehensive enterprise-grade, open source IaaS platform, targeted at organizations that require feature-rich, highly available, extremely reliable and easily managed private and hybrid clouds, according to company officials.

“The whole theme was enterprise grade, being able to have enterprise grade capabilities,” Butler said of the new release.

In addition to spreading the word about its latest release, Eucalyptus was also eager to weigh in on where we are with regards to cloud adoption and understanding right now.

According to Butler, one of the best parts of Cloud Expo West 2011, which took place in Santa Clara, Calif., was seeing how there is a lot of openness when it comes to the development of the cloud.

“It’s interesting that a lot of customers are looking at open-source based products in a more bottoms up way in terms of getting experience with the cloud,” Butler said. “You get the ability to train yourself and educate yourself if you are an information architect – that’s exciting about the space.

So what’s next for Eucalyptus in 2012?

“Partners, partners, partners,” Butler said, with a smile. “In general, we are really at a point now where we want to make sure we build out the partner system.”