Eucalyptus Systems, the open source cloud computing project that graduated from the hallways of academia to industry few months back, is back in news again (Cloud Ave's previous coverage of Eucalyptus is here and here. You can also listen to Paul Miller's podcast here.). This time, they have made an announcement and its repercussions can be felt for a very long time. This has a potential to shake up the enterprise cloud computing game and blur the distinction between the public and private clouds.

Yesterday, Eucalyptus Systems announced their first commercial product, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition, that will help businesses build on-premise Eucalyptus cloud that is compatible with VMware's vSphere, ESX and ESXi systems. Recently, I wrote about the Redhat's release of open source DeltaCloud API which abstracts away the differences in various cloud APIs and offering users with an easy way to manage various cloud vendors using different virtualization technologies. What Eucalyptus systems Enterprise Edition does is to homogenize multiple hypervisor technologies like Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX and ESXi, thereby, shaping an on-premise ecosystem into an Eucalyptus cloud that can be easily managed with a console. Eucalyptus is already compatible with Amazon public cloud and helps enterprises with a seamless integration between their on-premise and public clouds.

Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is built on top of the same open source Eucalyptus code base. The key benefits of this new offering to enterprises include

• Converts a VMware based virtual environment into an Amazon public cloud compatible one. It means you can run Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on the VMware based on premise cloud without any modifications. This is a fantastic news for enterprise IT. For example, they can now easily push their test workloads to Amazon clouds and get back to deploy on their on-premise clouds without any third party vendor or tool.
  
• Eucalyptus already supports Xen and KVM virtualization technologies. With the addition of VMware technologies to the pack, it now offers a single management console to manage multiple hypervisors present in the enterprise IT environment.
• Well, this also means that setting up a hybrid cloud is just a snap. No more Virtualization gurus needed.

Well, these are the kind of benefits which will excite a CIO or someone else who is responsible for the enterprise IT. I am looking at it from a totally different angle. Regular readers of Cloud Ave know that I am a strong advocate of an Open Federated Cloud ecosystem. Unlike a centralized cloud like Amazon's cloud or Microsoft's Azure, a federated system brings in some challenges for interoperability and integration. Without such an interoperability, a federated system of clouds becomes meaningless. An open federated cloud ecosystem should embrace all the cloud providers for it to make any sense. Technologies like Eucalyptus or, even, Deltacloud are playing a major role in getting these various members of the cloud ecosystem engage in a "two way conversation" which is crucial for the very existence of an open federated cloud ecosystem. Unlike the previous eras, I hope to see all the players involved in the cloud game come together and work towards empowering the customers.