Cloud: Ten Minutes With Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos

The VAR Guy promised that he’d keep an eye on MySQL veteran Marten Mickos (pictured left) in his tenure as CEO of open source cloud platform provider Eucalyptus Systems. Our resident blogger had the chance to chat with him for a few minutes this week and catch up. In ten minutes, Mickos covered a lot of ground. Here’s the update.

The last time The VAR Guy spoke with Mickos, the Eucalyptus CEO promised a renewed commitment to Eucalyptus’ reseller channel partners, and he says they’ve followed through, reopening the program to new applicants and reinforcing their relationships. In fact, while Mickos says they initially weren’t planning on this kind of international expansion so soon, he says Eucalyptus has its first partner in Scandinavia.

And speaking of partnerships, Mickos also says that earlier in October, the company announced its participation in the so-called NRE Alliance, a partnership between newScale, rPath, and Eucalyptus (Get it?) to give customers a better way to deploy self-service private and hybrid clouds. While Eucalyptus provides the platform itself, newScale offers services and rPath gives system automation. Professional services are handled by MomentumSI.

And open source cloud platforms have been in the news lately, with The VAR Guy himself keeping close watch on the OpenStack project — which is led by RackSpace and NASA. But Mickos doesn’t see it as a threat at all — in fact, he’s a big fan. OpenStack has made it clear that they don’t plan on releasing an enterprise edition of the same kind as the flagship, um, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. While Mickos says he has every expectation that OpenStack will take off and succeed, he doesn’t see them going after the same users.

So what’s next? Mickos says that they’ve already had a busy year, with the release of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition 2.0 and the launch of the Eucalyptus Partner Cloud — not to mention their first-ever partner day and at least two key partnerships technology-wise.

But Mickos says that they’re going to keep hammering away at those partner relationships, and keep improving the platform. Stay tuned to The VAR Guy for more Eucalyptus chatter as it comes around.

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