Amazon, Eucalyptus Partner To Bring Customers To Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service-provider Eucalyptus Systems have teamed up to enable Eucalyptus to bring its private cloud customers to Amazon’s public cloud.

The deal, announced Thursday, said AWS will support Eucalyptus as it develops AWS’ APIs (application programming interfaces) so customers can run apps compatible with Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

As a result, customers can migrate resources between their IT shops and AWS while using common management tools and skills across both environments.

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Anshuman Das, CEO of Eucalyptus partner Exelanz in Boston, Mass., which provides cloud services for small businesses, welcomed the agreement. “This will allow us to get more work for our clients because they have been waiting to use Amazon,” he said in an interview. “It opens more doors for public and private clouds.

One analyst said the deal allows Eucalyptus to bring larger workloads from their customers to the cloud, while creating more business for Amazon.

“This is about bringing together some of the private cloud customers that Eucalyptus has made in recent years to the world of public cloud resources. One of the first steps to bringing enterprises to the cloud is creating effective infrastructure clouds on-premise, which are then extended with platform capabilities either on-premise or in a public cloud,” Al Hiwa, IDC program director for applications development software, said in an interview. “Eucalyptus and Amazon are here offering the Amazon public cloud as an option for many of those on-premise cloud users."

Eucalyptus launched its partner program last June, called Eucalyptus Partner Cloud, aimed at systems integrators, resellers, service providers and platform companies.

Terry Wise, director of Amazon Web Services Partner Ecosystem, said customer will have more flexibility to move workloads between their existing IT environments and the AWS cloud.

"Enterprises can now take advantage of a common set of APIs that work with both AWS and Eucalyptus, enabling the use of scripts and other management tools across both platforms without the need to rewrite or maintain environment-specific versions," Wise said in a statement.

Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, said the agreement will make it easaier for customers to move to the cloud. “The ability to develop against a common set of market-leading APIs, for both on-premise and cloud deployments, is a big benefit for our customers and software partners,” he said in a statement.