Cloud.com floats into Australia

Beverley Head
Thursday, 29 April 2010 14:44

IT Industry - Strategy

Canberra start up Cloud Central has provided an acid test for the open source Cloud Stack Platform developed by VMops,  which will next week formally launch the product and rebrand itself as Cloud.com.

Cloud Central, the brainchild of Kristoffer Sheather, sells access to a cloud of computer infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis, starting at 3 cents an hour. One of only two Australian organisations to have beta test copies of Cloud.com's software, the organisation is among the first in the world to roll it out into a production environment.

According to Sheather:  'This came at a very good time for us, and allowed us to get to market faster and without the level of investment we might have needed.'  Sheather said he had also considered the open source cloud platform Eucalyptus, which he felt was not sufficiently mature, and VM Ware, but found that too expensive for his business model.

Although the early VMops stack that Sheather received in November was buggy, it has been improved, and Cloud Central has also developed additional software that allowed it to launch a commercial service in mid March.

Cupertino based Cloud.com is the brainchild of Sheng Liang, who developed the Java Virtual Machine at Sun, and was a co-founder of Teros, a firewall maker sold to Citrix in 2005. In late 2008 he put a team together to develop a suite of tools that could be used to build infrastructure clouds, comprising a hyperviser to allow dynamic provisioning of resources, management tools, and end user administration tools to manage the cloud.

Peder Ulander, chief marketing office of the company, said that in November last year the organisation signed up 40 organisations around the world to trial what was then known as a the VMops cloud stack . Cloud Central was one Australian user, the other being a '$250 million Australian services provider' which Ulander declined to name.

In January the company completed a second round of venture capital funding, receiving $US17.6 million from Redpoint Ventures, Nexus Ventures and Index Ventures. According to Ulander this will allow the company to relaunch and deliver its 'Turnkey preconfigured software stack for corporations and service providers.'

The company currently has fewer than 35 employees, but is expanding and has just hired Kyle Macdonald from Hosting.com as the firm's chief evangelist.

Cloud.com's Cloud Stack Platform comes integrated with Xen and KVM hypervisors, deployed with Ubuntu, CentOS and Fedora distributions. It's also being made available open source through GPLv3 licences.