It is a hectic and exciting week in the Enterprise and Cloud Computing space.  With no less then 5 events happening in the Bay Area many companies have announcements about their companies and product lines.  Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and all the other public cloud providers are doing a great job to educate the market and lead the cloud movement, but everyone wants to know when the big enterprise IT spenders will embrace cloud internally beyond just kicking the tires.  The company getting all the attention in the private cloud space and leading the way from an ecosystem perspective is Santa Barbara based Eucalyptus.  At the end of last week they announced the release of their 2.0 product and this week they have followed things up with the unveiling of their partner program with an already impressive set of organizations signed up.

With the Eucalyptus 2.o release, the company is taking greater strides to meeting all the demands the average enterprise will have when it comes to support for running a private cloud.  This release introduces two very nice features in Windows image hosting and Dell Equallogic SAN support, as well as some higher level  abilities around group and quota management.  With all enterprises running some level/form of Windows servers, and Dell pushing their acquired Equallogic solution heavily through the SMB and Enterprise space its clear that Eucalyptus is doing a great job of not only listening to the Open Source community, but also the demanding enterprise folks that have been early adopters in the space.

In catching up with newly appointed CEO Marten Mickos about the release, he spoke about how they are ramping the company at an accelerated pace due to the amazing demand they are seeing.  In doing so, they are adding headcount in all departments and trying to stay on pace with a 6 month release cycle which is VERY aggressive for a product of its nature.  Having run MySQL from inception, through hyper growth, to $1 billion exit to Sun, Marten welcomes the new challenges he, and the company face, with rolling out their solutions.  Marten puts it as, "With MySQL, we were a disruptor of the old world, where with Eucalyptus, we are an innovator of the new world".

At the same time, he cautioned that enterprises are just now starting to get through the real "tire kicking" phase of adoption, moving into production as well as increasing the size of initial pilot projects.  He referred to increase usage by existing customers/orgs in NASA, Eli Lily, and Trend Micro.  The market opportunity is of course HUGE and all the players involved today stand to be big winners if they continue to execute.  When asked about the soon to be released VMWare offering dubbed "Project Redwood", Marten said he welcomes the release of the product as it will create an even more increase in awareness and adoption of cloud build outs which will only benefit all involved.

To help cater to enterprises and the community even beyond what the Eucalyptus team is building themselves, they have been partnering left and right with a solid list of partners at every level of the cloud stack.  This week I attended their first partner event in San Francisco to see some presentations from some of their early partners.  Two choices Eucalyptus made when first launching the company are paying off extremely well.., one in choosing a commercial open source play…, the second in choosing to implement the AWS API’s for their first platform interface.  In doing so, customers and partners have zero barrier to entry in trying out their solution, whether it be as an end user, or as a potential integration partner.  From Dell, and newly announced HP on the hardware side, Canonical and Novell at the OS layer, to Trend Micro in security, and RightScale at the management layer, it shows that their strategy is paying off.

Next up on the list according the founder and CTO Rich Wolski, besides releasing great product enhancements and growing the Open Source and partner communities, is to take the cloud use cases to the next level of usage and scalability.  Right now you see customers running things in the 10’s to couple hundreds of nodes.., but they want to start seeing some adoption in the 1000’s of nodes, whether it be at a service provider, or large Enterprise/Gov’t group.  With these increased usage use cases, they will get to tackle a whole new set of setup and scalability experiences which will harden the platform for any cloud use case.