Cloud Players Unite For Enterprise Private Cloud Initiative

Eucalyptus Systems, newScale, rPath and MomentumSI have joined forces to become a one-stop shop for enterprise private and hybrid clouds, according to Jake Sorofman, rPath's chief marketing officer and coalition member. The integrated platform will act as an on-ramp to private and hybrid cloud computing and enable enterprises to leverage the agility of cloud computing with a self-service and automated system, Sorofman added.

The joint offering comprises solutions from Eucalyptus Systems, an open source private cloud software maker; rPath, maker of automated system deployment and maintenance and controls; newScale, which offers a self-service enterprise IT storefront for private and cloud services; and MomentumSI, a cloud computing systems integrator and services provider.

Sorofman said the coalition looks to create the future model for cloud-based IT operations and offer a private cloud solution that acts as an internally managed version of Amazon EC2 in that it is self-service, automated and elastic. He said most IT organizations are currently not ready to make the leap into the cloud because they lack the infrastructure and processes maturity to get public cloud functionality in a private or hybrid cloud infrastructure.

"We want to make central IT functions look more like a public cloud," he said.

The coalition targets Fortune 1000 companies through its joint go-to-market, which has MomentumSI running the point as the integrator. Sorofman added that other integrators could be added to the fold over time, but currently MomentumSI will take the integration lead.

The goal, Sorofman said, is to make enterprise private and hybrid clouds better resemble public cloud offerings and "allow IT organizations to look and act a lot more like a public cloud."

But it's not just about private clouds, Sorofman noted.

"The hybrid aspect is really about insuring workloads can run outside the private cloud where appropriate," he said, adding that public clouds are good for spike loads and bursts and for development and testing environments.

And Sorofman is quick to add that the initiative forged by Eucalyptus, rPath, newScale and MomentumSI isn't a "because we can" play, it's forging a path for where the cloud computing and IT markets are heading. Sorofman said the self-service private cloud initiative falls in line with where industry watchers see cloud computing heading.

"[Internal and private cloud] seems like a no-brainer: faster time-to-market, a fully virtualized environment, flexible chargeback if needed, and all inside your corporate protections. What's not to love? ... To be ready, [organizations] must first scale operational standardization, automation, and virtualization mountains," Forrester Research recently wrote in a report called "You're Not Ready For Internal Cloud."

"The market is clearly going in this direction," Sorofman said. "This is a shared vision and a shared opportunity."