Enterprise

This Startup That Angered A Lot Of Open Source Fans Just Got $30 Million In Funding

By Julie Bort
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Marten Mickos Eucalyptus Systems
Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems  Flickr/linux_foundation

A software startup that lets users run their clouds just got a big fat $30 million round led by led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).

Eucalyptus Systems makes "private cloud" software that is specifically designed to work with Amazon's cloud. This lets enterprises fire up a cloud in their own data centers. If they want to use a public cloud, they can set up an Amazon instance and let the data flow between the two.

Eucalyptus has also been popular with hosting providers who want to siphon off a few of Amazon's customers by offering compatible cloud services.

Last month, the companies announced a deal where Amazon will help Eucalyptus stay compatible with its cloud.

Eucalyptus is known in the open source community for a couple of reasons. Its CEO is Marten Mickos, of mySQL fame. MySQL is an open source database that was heralded as a proving point for open source software. It grew so popular that Sun bought it in 2008 for $1 billion.

That was a jaw dropping amount of money at the time, when people were still debating the wisdom of giving away software for free. MySQL is now in the hands of Oracle.

But Eucalyptus was unusual in another way. It was one of the first commercial companies to champion a concept called "open core." This is where the company releases the source code of its base product under an open source license, but keeps some extra features for paying customers hidden and proprietary.

That tactic upset some open source advocates. While these folks have no problem with a software company charging for software, they want access to the source code to modify as they wish -- and to see what the product is doing with their data.

At one point, Eucalyptus was Canonical's cloud for its Ubuntu Linux operating system. But Canonical ditched Eucalyptus for the fully open source OpenStack cloud operating system.

Eucalyptus has bounced back from that loss of partnership. It says that its software is used by more than 20 of the Fortune 100.

IVP joins existing investors Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). To date, Eucalyptus has raised $55.5 million in capital.

More about the cloud:  VMWare To Competitors: You're The Ugly Sisters, We're Cinderella

 

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Julie Bort
Julie Bort
Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.
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