Abiquo , the Open Source Cloud company from Barcelona, has been busy the last couple of weeks. Last week they announced two important milestones in their existence.
First of all a round of 1.5M euro Series A funding was announced
€1 million comes from Nauta Capital, another 441.000 Euro comes from Caja Navarra
and another 100.000 Euro comes from their new CEO, Pete Malcolm .
The bio of their new CEO, Pete Malcom reads as follows “Pete joined Abiquo in 2009 to boost the international expansion of the Company, thanks to his extensive experience in making companies with a strong technical profile successful. He is a British serial entrepreneur and technologist, best known as the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Orchestria Corporation, which was acquired in January 2009 by CA Inc.. for an undisclosed sum. Previously, Pete was Benchmark Capital Europe’s first Entrepreneur In Residence, and prior to that, Senior Vice President of Business Management with CA. He is the inventor of more than 150 patents in the field of software.”
Abiquo lets us know that with this fresh money they will be able to strengthen the commercial efforts for their solutions on both national and international level.
Apart from the organizational updates Abiquo yesterday also announced the first formal release of abiCloud 1.0.0 together with this first formal release it has also changed it’s license from a
combination of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Common Public Attribution License (CAPL) to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3.
The change of license was inspired by simplicity, the community is much more at ease with a familiar license such as the LGPL for everything then with a mixture of 2 lesser known licenses for different modules.
Diego Mariño co-founder and VP Community Solutions at Abiquo says that the change to LGPL gives the community greater flexibility ““the LGPL license keeps the Cloud open and keeps the organizations that promote it in the black. Proprietary software can use abiCloud as a component without losing the proprietary nature of that software.”
With a couple of big key european players integrating abiCloud in their cloud strategy abiquo is set for growth.
AbiCloud is sill vendor neutral, providing concurrent support of all major hypervisors, as well industry standards such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).
When asked how their product differentiates from the other open source cloud platform vendors there are two remarking features that stand out, they offer an impressive gui for their end users while not neglecting the skilled sysadmins by giving them a CLI that can connect with the API.
Secondly they claim really easy management of users, organisations , datacenter resources, virtual-datacenters and virtual apps. So easy that you can define a hierachy of resources and users rights in minutes .
AbiCloud 1.0.0 is available for immediate download at www.abicloud.org.