Eucalyptus Systems, developers of an open source-based private cloud platform, is starting 2011 by expanding into Asia. Eucalyptus China, based in Beijing, will be managed by open source veteran Claude Zhao Quin, formerly the CEO of Great OpenSource/Turbolinux.

The idea of making such an international move now, according to the Eucalyptus press release, is simply to meet a growing demand in Asian markets for private cloud solutions. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition enables enterprises and cloud service providers to turn any legacy hardware into a private Amazon EC2-compatible cloud platform. (EC2 is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.)

This move likely reflects an accelerating international sales push on the part of Eucalyptus Systems, which could face coopetition (cooperation and competition) from the OpenStack open source cloud effort.

Eucalyptus Systems signed its first Scandanavian partner in the Fall of 2010. We’ll be watching to see if the company makes more international moves.

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