Former MySQL CEO To Lead Eucalyptus Systems

Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, has been named the new CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, an open source software cloud computing platform that enables the implementation of on-premise private and hybrid clouds using a company's existing hardware and software infrastructure. Mickos helped drive MySQL to become the second largest open source company in the world and was later acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008. Mickos explained his decision to jump back into the fray as the world of open source software and cloud computing get more entwined:

"Eucalyptus Systems has a brilliant team, highly sophisticated open source technology, and an early lead in a market with a massive global opportunity — all the ingredients for major impact. Private and hybrid cloud computing is the future of corporate IT, and for cloud computing to reach its potential, it will have to be built on open source software such as Eucalyptus. I am privileged to assume the responsibilities of the Eucalyptus CEO to collaborate and learn from its talented team and deliver on the full promise of cloud computing.”

Eucalyptus provides APIs that are compatible with Amazon EC2 and provides commercial support for those APIs with the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (launched in late 2009). Customers have the ability to move a workload, which run as a VMware virtual machine in the data center into Amazon EC2 without the user needing to know anything about Amazon's proprietary machine image (AMI) format. Eucalyptus automatically handles the conversion. Similarly, it can import a workload from Amazon and allow it to run again back in the customer's data center. The ability to move workloads out of the data center and into a public cloud is one of the big ideas in cloud computing. If customers can be sure that it works in a flawless and automated manner, then it would spur greater use of cloud computing in the enterprise.

According to Eucalyptus the company's open source cloud platform is built into the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and is used by Eli Lilly, NASA and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.