At the Structure 2010 conference on cloud computing, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, former Amazon executives who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service, announced that they are launching Nimbula. Nimbula’s business and technology focus is on blending EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with private infrastructure customization and control.
Nimbula has been operating in stealth mode since early 2009 with $5.75 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware.
Today Nimbula also unveiled details of the technology that provides the foundation for its first product, Nimbula Director, a cloud computing operating system that efficiently manages on- and off-premises IT resources on customer-controlled infrastructure.
Nimbula Director delivers utility grade computing and empowers IT innovation behind the firewall. Unlike other enterprise cloud solutions, Nimbula provides for linear scaling to thousands of nodes and automated hands-off installation and data center management. Fine-grained policy-based authorization and network security combined with metered bursting into public clouds such as Amazon Web Services offer unmatched control and visibility.
Prior to founding Nimbula, Pinkham was Vice President of Engineering at Amazon and leader of the group that planned and developed Amazon EC2. Prior to joining Amazon, Pinkham founded the first ISP in Africa, which was acquired by UUNET.
Co-founder and Vice President of Products Willem van Biljon led the Amazon EC2 development effort. Prior to joining Amazon, van Biljon was a co-founder of Mosaic Software, which was acquired by S1 Corp.
Pinkham, van Biljon and Sequoia’s Botha have served as Board members since 2009. Today, Nimbula announced that VMware former CEO and co-founder, Diane Greene, also has joined the Board.
Other members of the Nimbula management team are Martin Buhr, Nimbula Vice President of Sales and Business Development, and Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula Vice President of Marketing. Most recently, Buhr spent four and a half years with Amazon Web Services where he led business development and sales for Amazon EC2, and served as Business Director for EMEA. Malekzadeh spent more than eight years at VMware in its Palo Alto headquarters and in EMEA. He was previously VP of International at Akimbi, which was acquired by VMware.
Nimbula is currently in beta with half a dozen large international customers in the financial services, technology and healthcare industries. The company plans a formal product launch and ramp to sales in the second half of 2010.
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