Last week, Bloomberg reported that EMC planned to acquire Cloudscaling, the commercial OpenStack vendor, for “less than $50M” according to unidentified sources close to the deal. Founded in 2006, Cloudscaling has raised approximately $10M in capital to date from sources such as Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks and Seagate. The deal represents the second major acquisition of an OpenStack startup following Cisco’s recent acquisition of Metacloud for an undisclosed sum. By acquiring Cloudscaling, EMC stands to benefit from the addition of Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias to its cloud services team. Bias, a well known cloud luminary and OpenStack evangelist, will strengthen EMC’s positioning within the IaaS space by giving the company enviable cloud credentials and thought leadership from day one of Cloudscaling’s integration into the EMC ecosystem. Details of the acquisition have yet to be disclosed although, given EMC’s ownership of VMware and Pivotal, the purchase of Cloudscaling is likely to have significant repercussions for the cloud and Big Data spaces, particularly given Joshua McKenty’s recent transition to Pivotal from Piston Cloud Computing as field CTO. With McKenty and Randy Bias on its corporate or spinoff roster, in conjunction with Cloudscaling’s technology and cluster of talent, EMC looks set to make an aggressive move to combine cloud technologies with big data application development in ways done by almost no entity except Amazon Web Services. More generally, EMC’s acquisition of Cloudscaling illustrates how OpenStack startups are suddenly morphing into hot cakes that are likely to be snapped up by larger vendors intent on getting a larger piece of the OpenStack pie. The industry should expect OpenStack-related acquisitions to proliferate as OpenStack matures and the startups that entered the space three to four years ago increasingly productize and perfect the deployment of their IaaS platforms.
Category: Cloudscaling
Cloudscaling To Launch OpenStack-based Product For Large Private Clouds
Cloudscaling, the cloud computing consulting company that specializes in the deployment of cloud infrastructures in accord with customer specifications, will be changing its business model to offer a product alongside its consulting services. The product in question will be an OpenStack-based cloud operating system with all of the features and functionality required to deliver large enterprise deployments. According to GigaOM, Cloudscaling expects to target the higher end of the scale when it comes to enterprise deployments of OpenStack by focusing on “customer-facing clouds from carriers and MSPs, Internet applications from companies like Facebook, and entirely new applications within large enterprises.” As such, Cloudscaling will focus its new offering on OpenStack-based, large enterprise private clouds in ways that allow it to differentiate itself from vendors such as Nebula and Piston Cloud Computing. The product, branded Cloudscaling OCS (Open Cloud System), will feature Open Cloud OS, an OpenStack-based, enterprise grade cloud operating system in addition to Hardware Blueprint, which contains hardware specifications and blueprints for the deployment in question. Cloudscaling will provide further details about Cloudscaling OCS at the Cloud Carrier Forum in Santa Clara, California on Monday.
Cloud Computing Today 