Eucalyptus Claims: Fortune 100 Runs Our Private Cloud Software

Eucalyptus Systems, which provides a platform to turn legacy hardware into Amazon EC2-compatible private clouds, is making a bold claim. Indeed, the company says 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition cloud. That makes those large enterprises a part of the over 25,000 Eucalyptus private clouds now deployed in the public and private sectors.

Of course it’s important to note that Eucalyptus is open source. So some of those Fortune 100 companies may not be paying fees to Eucalyptus. And we can’t pinpoint Eucalyptus’s financial performance since the company is privately held.

Still, Eucalyptus seems to be gaining mind share at a critical time. Contributing to their growing cloud momentum, Eucalyptus says, is their expanding stable of partners. Major industry companies like Dell and HP joined up with Eucalyptus in 2010 as platform partners, while smaller firms like RightScale and Jamcracker have signed on to provide cloud services.

On the reseller front, 2010 has seen Eucalyptus sign its first-ever agreement with a Scandinavian partner, and system integrator MomentumSI is the preferred agent for implementing and migrating enterprise to the so-called NRE Alliance of combined newScale, rPath, and Eucalyptus cloud solution.

And, perhaps most notably, Eucalyptus Systems’s technologies and buzz drew open source management talent like former MySQL head Marten Mickos and Red Hat sales veteran Said Ziouani to sign onto the core executive team.

No doubt, 2010 was an eventful year for Eucalyptus, as a quick search of TalkinCloud sister site The VAR Guy’s archives will show.

Still, TalkinCloud is watching to see how Eucalyptus potentially competes and cooperates with OpenStack, the open source cloud platform initially championed by RackSpace and NASA.

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