Former MySQL CEO Lands At Cloud Startup
Mickos most recently served as CEO of MySQL, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 for $1 billion, an astronomical sum for an open source company. Mickos left Sun in February 2009. At the time of his departure he was senior vice president of Sun's database group.
With Mickos taking over the top spot, former Eucalyptus CEO Woody Rollins will shift to the role of Eucalyptus' CFO.
"Eucalyptus Systems has a brilliant team, highly sophisticated open source technology, and an early lead in a market with a massive global opportunity - all the ingredients for major impact," said Mickos in a statement announcing his arrival. "Private and hybrid cloud computing is the future of corporate IT, and for cloud computing to reach its potential, it will have to be built on open source software such as Eucalyptus. I am privileged to assume the responsibilities of the Eucalyptus CEO to collaborate and learn from its talented team and deliver on the full promise of cloud computing."
Mickos held the top executive post at MySQL for seven years. In that time he is credited with growing the company from a startup to the second largest open source organization globally and the most widely used open source data base. Before MySQL, Mickos was a multinational CEO and senior executive in various positions in his native Finland.
Mickos also is a member of the board of directors at RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and Electrosonic.
"Marten is unmatched in his ability to blend open-source business techniques and technologies to build an industry leading company. We are both thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to work with him and look forward to seeing his knowledge and boundless energy move Eucalyptus forward," said Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder of Eucalyptus. "The open source Eucalyptus software, with full compatibility with public clouds, has quickly become the de facto standard for private cloud computing. Working with Marten will help us capitalize on our position in the market."
Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Eucalyptus launched its first commercial product in October 2009. Its software is the cloud platform for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
Eucalyptus offers a suite of APIs that are compatible with Amazon's Web Services offerings and provides support for the APIs. The open source software is used to implement on-premise cloud computing solutions using existing IT infrastructure without costly modifications, additional hardware or reconfiguration. Essentially, Eucalyptus turns data center resources like machines, networks and storage systems, into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT.
Eucalyptus also supports the same APIs as public clouds, which makes it fully compatible with AWS and lets users seamlessly move applications between on-premise Eucalyptus clouds and public clouds. The solutions ease the deployment of hybrid cloud environments.
Along with its open source cloud software, Eucalyptus also offers its Enterprise Edition, an on-premise solution for VMware vShpere users that adds cloud functionality leveraging VMware virtualization technologies.