Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud software, announced today that Mårten Mickos has joined the company as chief executive officer. Mickos comes to Eucalyptus with a track record of building global disruptive businesses, most recently as CEO of MySQL AB, where he grew the company from a start-up to the second largest open source company in the world. Former Eucalyptus CEO Woody Rollins is now Eucalyptus Systems’ chief financial officer.

“Eucalyptus Systems has a brilliant team, highly sophisticated open source technology, and an early lead in a market with a massive global opportunity — all the ingredients for major impact,” said Mickos. “Private and hybrid cloud computing is the future of corporate IT, and for cloud computing to reach its potential, it will have to be built on open source software such as Eucalyptus. I am privileged to assume the responsibilities of the Eucalyptus CEO to collaborate and learn from its talented team and deliver on the full promise of cloud computing.”

As CEO for MySQL for seven years, Mickos guided its successful commercial open source business through to its purchase by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008. After MySQL’s acquisition, he served as senior vice president of Sun's Database Group. Previously, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He is currently a member of the board of directors at RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and Electrosonic. Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.

“I am very excited that Mårten is joining the Eucalyptus team,” said Rollins. “We have seen tremendous growth in uptake of both our technology and our products in recent months. Mårten’s unparalleled experience in building open source business signals our transition from start-up to sustainable market leader.”

“Mårten is unmatched in his ability to blend open-source business techniques and technologies to build an industry leading company. We are both thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to work with him and look forward to seeing his knowledge and boundless energy move Eucalyptus forward,” commented Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder at Eucalyptus Systems. “The open source Eucalyptus software, with full compatibility with public clouds, has quickly become the de facto standard for private cloud computing. Working with Mårten will help us capitalize on our position in the market.”

Eucalyptus: The Emerging Standard for Private and Hybrid Cloud Computing

Eucalyptus is open source software for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own secure IT infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. With Eucalyptus, customers can make more efficient use of their computing resources, increase productivity, and deploy new applications faster, while protecting sensitive data and reducing capital expenditures.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications between on-premise Eucalyptus clouds and public clouds, as well as to “cloud burst” to public clouds when extra capacity is required. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy hybrid clouds, which use both public and private cloud resources together.

The open source Eucalyptus software is widely downloaded and used. It serves as the engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a cloud computing solution packaged in the latest version of Canonical’s popular Ubuntu distribution. Leading organizations and institutions such as Eli Lilly, NASA and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) implement Eucalyptus as part of strategic cloud computing initiatives.

In addition to its open source software, Eucalyptus Systems also provides the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE). Eucalyptus EE is the only on-premise cloud computing solution available today for VMware vSphere customers, providing a robust, affordable cloud computing solution that leverages their investment in VMware virtualization technologies.

About Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

Eucalyptus Systems develops enterprise-grade technology solutions built on the open source Eucalyptus software for private and hybrid cloud computing. Originally developed as part of an NSF-funded academic research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Eucalyptus is quickly becoming the standard for on-premise cloud computing, delivering the cost efficiencies and scalability of a cloud architecture with the security and control of deploying on an organization’s own IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus is the only private cloud to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus is available as open source software and also in the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE), a commercial offering designed for large scale enterprises. For more information about Eucalyptus, please visit http://www.eucalyptus.com.

Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus Systems are pending trademarks in the U.S. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Other product or company names mentioned may be trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=6221418&lang=en