EMC to buy OpenStack cloud guru Cloudscaling

 

An EMC spokesperson this afternoon confirmed that the company will buy Cloudscaling, which builds clouds based on the OpenStack software.

 

The deal would mark the latest in a wave of consolidation in the cloud industry, with previous big acquisitions including HP snapping up Euclayptus and Cisco buying OpenStack vendor Metacloud. It also comes as there is some shakeup in the OpenStack community, with one of the forefathers of the movement, Joshua McKenty leaving his post as CTO of Piston Cloud Computing Co. and landing at Pivotal, the VMware/EMC spinout that is focused on the open source Cloud Foundry platform as a service. The move also comes just before the latest Juno release of the project and as the community gears up for its semi-annual summit to be held in Paris.

 

Cloudscaling has been a prominent member of the OpenStack community for years. The company's co-founder and CEO Randy Bias is one of the outspoken leaders of OpenStack, evangelizing not only his company's platform but the OpenStack project in general at industry trade shows and events.

 

Cloudscaling the company helps its customers build public or private clouds based on the company's software, which is powered by OpenStack. Bias has talked about the company's affinity for building web-scale distributed systems like those run by Amazon and Google. While some in the OpenStack community have considered Amazon a foe, Bias's Cloudscaling seems to embrace AWS and wants to bring an AWS-like cloud to regular enterprises.  

 

EMC buying OpenStack continues the company's foray into the open source project. EMC is already a corporate backer of OpenStack and within the last year has hired some OpenStack talent, including former Rackspace evangelist Kenneth Hui.

 

EMC spokesperson Dave Farmer confirmed the news, which was first reported by Bloomberg. "To further extend EMC's breadth of cloud platform support, including VMware and others, EMC signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cloudscaling." He added that more details about the Clouscaling purchase will be released on Oct. 28 when the company has an event.