Coming to America: Abiquo Cloud Management

Abiquo, founded in Spain with a background in grid computing and open source, has relaunched in the U.S. as a cloud management vendor. Abiquo, now based in Redwood City, Calif., has announced its corporate relocation, a $5.1 million funding injection, and the latest version of its management software, Abiquo 1.5. Abiquo’s journey is interesting for two reasons…

… which include:

1. Channel Strategy: In the U.S., Abiquo plans to sell to service providers, hosting companies in particular. This is a continuation of the company’s work in Europe, where it has four hosting customers. Those include Nexica, a data center and managed services provider based in Barcelona.

Abiquo will also tap OEM partners, according to Pete Malcolm, Abiquo’s chief executive officer.

“We will be working with a lot of partners interested in OEM versions for private, cloud-in-a-box” offerings, he said. Those OEMS may include hardware vendors, storage vendors and large systems integrators.

2. VM Conversion Among Hypervisors: Abiquo 1.5 lets customers translate virtual machine images among different hypervisor types. A solutions provider, for example, can convert from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V, in what the company describes as a single, drag-and-drop operation. The roster of hypervisors supported include VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM and Virtual Box.

The hypervisor conversion potentially addresses the issue of cloud interoperability. The lack of compatibility among virtualized environment has made it difficult to move server instances from one vendor to another, although some progress has been made on the storage side.

Malcolm said Abiquo’s hypervisor-neutral approach lets customers avoid vendor lock in and counter what he termed artificially high prices on the part of some vendors. He said he’s not suggesting that every large enterprise will immediately convert virtual machines from one hypervisor to another. But the ability to do just that dramatically improves the customer’s negotiation position when its time to renew a maintenance license, he added.

Open Source or Enterprise License

The company provides its cloud management product as an open source Community Edition and as a commercial Enterprise Edition. The former is offered via the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3. Abiquo 1.5 will be available within 45 days.

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