Tuesday, October 16, 2012
SoCal's Cloud Dreams Surface At OpenStack Summit
A conference being held this week by the OpenStack cloud software group has surfaced what looks to be a surge in cloud-based companies in Southern California, including a number of startups. OpenStack is a new group which is focusing on establishing a standard set of applications and configurations for allowing enterprises and developers to run their cloud-based apps in a standard way across different ISPs, based on open source software spun out of Rackspace.
Among the area companies showing their interest in the cloud are Dreamhost, the ISP and cloud services firm, which announced its DreamCompute service Monday; Media Temple, the ISP and hosting services company headed by Demian Sellfors, with its own cloud service; Morphlabs, the cloud deployment software firm run by open source startup master Winston Damarillo; a new startup, Metacloud, run by Steve Curry, formerly of Ticketmaster, offering up private cloud services; and Ceph, which develops massively scalable storage software, and is powering the storage behind many of those private cloud efforts.
Despite the still widespread belief that the region has more media and content firms than hard technology, cloud software firms are actually very strong in the area; other cloud software companies in the region include Eucalyptus, with its cloud deployment and management software; NetSol Technologies, which recently expanded into the infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) market; Nirvanix, which provides cloud-based storage services; and RightScale, a developer of cloud management software.