{"id":646829,"date":"2013-03-14T14:47:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T18:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=620035"},"modified":"2013-03-14T14:47:26","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T18:47:26","slug":"how-openstack-upended-the-private-cloud-market-overnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/646829","title":{"rendered":"How OpenStack upended the private cloud market overnight"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like to think of the private cloud market as existing in two distinct eras \u2014 Before OpenStack and Anno OpenStack. It is now 3 A.O. (well, in a few months), and Oracle\u2019s announced acquisition of Nimbula on Wednesday<\/a> got me thinking of just how much the world has changed since OpenStack officially launched on July 18, 2010<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010<\/a>\u00a0(subscription req\u2019d)<\/em>, entitled \u201cDefining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,\u201d seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of \u201cwhere are they now.\u201d Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here\u2019s what has happened to the private companies and startups.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Abiquo<\/a>: <\/strong>Abiquo has a new CEO<\/strong>, 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<\/a>, but hasn\u2019t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.<\/li>\n
  2. Appistry<\/a>: <\/strong>Appistry made a huge shift<\/strong> in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n
  3. CA<\/a>: <\/strong>CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010<\/a> \u2014 Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them \u2014 but it has been essentially silent<\/strong> since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy <\/em>in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.<\/li>\n
  4. Cloud.com<\/a>: <\/strong>Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million<\/a> in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack<\/a> called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.<\/li>\n
  5. Elastra: <\/strong>Elastra is no more<\/strong><\/a>.<\/li>\n
  6. Enomaly<\/a>: <\/strong>Enomaly\u2019s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought<\/strong> the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property<\/a> in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.<\/li>\n
  7. Eucalyptus Systems<\/a>: <\/strong>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<\/a>) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they\u2019ll likely tell a different story<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  8. GigaSpaces<\/a>: <\/strong>GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term \u201cprivate cloud.\u201d 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<\/a> that\u2019s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.<\/li>\n
  9. Joyent<\/a>:\u00a0<\/strong>Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company \u2014 which has raised an incredible $115 million<\/a> \u2014 is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings<\/a> and has landed some big-name users.<\/li>\n
  10. Librato<\/a>: <\/strong>Librato looks to have abandoned<\/strong> its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff \u2014 sensors, server use, whatever. \u00a0It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.<\/li>\n
  11. LongJump<\/a>: <\/strong>In hindsight, LongJump\u2019s 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\u2019s infrastructure or your own.<\/li>\n
  12. Morphlabs<\/a>: <\/strong>Morphlabs is the master of pivots<\/strong>, although it\u2019s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform<\/a> called mCloud Osmium in February.<\/li>\n
  13. Nimbula<\/a>: <\/strong>Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an \u201cacquihire\u201d<\/strong> situation, although neither company will comment on the details.<\/li>\n
  14. Platform Computing<\/a>:\u00a0<\/strong>IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011<\/a> and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that\u2019s a bad thing \u2014 Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I\u2019d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.<\/li>\n
  15. Virtustream<\/a>:\u00a0<\/strong>Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010<\/a> (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It\u2019s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private\/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers\u2019 data centers.<\/li>\n
  16. <\/strong>Voxel: <\/strong>Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million<\/strong> by managed hosting provider Internap<\/a> in January 2012.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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 \u2014 which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

    I haven\u2019t run the numbers, but I\u2019d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward \u201cprivate cloud\u201d in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We\u2019ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack<\/a> to some degree \u2014 Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game<\/a> thanks to OpenStack.<\/p>\n

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

    \"Structure<\/a><\/p>\n

    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<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    Who\u2019s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services \u2014 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).<\/p>\n

    The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They\u2019ve 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 \u2014 which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment \u2014 but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.<\/p>\n

    All of the aforementioned companies are\/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we\u2019re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry<\/a>. Providers that weren\u2019t part of that community are jumping on board<\/a>, and it\u2019s just a few established holdovers that look like they\u2019ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry\u2019s coattails.<\/p>\n

    Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You\u2019re either really early and\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>good, or you wait for an open source project \u2014 OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. \u2014 and try to build on that. There\u2019s following fast, and there\u2019s following smart.<\/p>\n

    Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

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