Ex-MySQL boss plots Second Cloud Coming

Open...and Shut It's always unwise to count out Marten Mickos. The former chief executive of MySQL scored big when Sun Microsystems bought the ever-rising open-source database star for a cool $1bn, and seemed destined to bring this same Midas touch to open-source cloud computing vendor Eucalyptus Systems, the company he currently runs.

It's not that Eucalyptus is perfect, nevertheless rather than Mickos and the Eucalyptus team have forged ahead with the thing that matters most to cloud-hungry IT departments: real-world deployments. In a new market, would-be adopters of a research want the comfort of knowing they're not beta-ware guinea pigs. Even though OpenStack has shown a lot of promise, it's nevertheless mostly promise, whereas Eucalyptus has been battle-tested for over two years in actual deployments.

It's as well why Red Hat has partnered with Eucalyptus. Red Hat is a heavily customer-centric company. If it didn't think Eucalyptus solved real customer needs right however, it wouldn't give Eucalyptus a second thought. In actual fact, a year ago when I talked with Red Hat executives there were real doubts expressed about Eucalyptus' innovation and strategy. Today those same executives are much more sanguine about Eucalytpus' prospects.

Why the shift? Eucalyptus has focused on building a viable business, with real innovation improvements and real customer deployments. So often startups get caught up in meaningless popularity contests that appeal only to the vociferous industry observers who spend $0.00 now can always afford to give their $0.02.

Even but, there are ongoing complaints about so-called "open washing" in Eucalyptus. However not from clients. They're getting work done, and often with Eucalyptus. I'm sure they read the media's concern with cloud-computing lock-in, but at the time they're buying into VMware, Salesforce, Amazon, and Eucalyptus to solve real business problems.

It's just a innovation, and a business, that continues to gain supporters, albeit at an increasing rate of growth. With Mickos at the helm, we probably shouldn't have doubted. ®

Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Strobe, a startup that offers an open source framework for building mobile apps. He was formerly chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfreso's general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open-source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative. His column, Open...and Shut, appears twice a week on The Register.