Eucalyptus Session at Cloud Expo

Mårten Mickos, the guy who sold MySQL to Sun for a billion dollars, has got himself another company. Now all he has to do is find another sucker like Sun.

Mårten, who wouldn't be Mårten without that cute little Finnish doohickey over his name, has been named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the open source private cloud start-up. Woody Rollins, who was CEO, has morphed into the company's CFO.

Since leaving Sun and MySQL last year, Mårten has been at Benchmark Capital, which backed MySQL, as entrepreneur-in-residence trying to spot his next opportunity. As it happens Eucalyptus is a Benchmark investment. Benchmark led its $5.5 million first round.

Mårten says that while he was at Benchmark he asked around and people identified only two real hot buttons: the cloud and the mobile Internet. Both of them are gonna be massively big, but he feels more comfortable with the cloud and open source, the University of California PhDs at Eucalyptus and what he reckons is an early lead in the market.

"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," he said.

Not that Eucalyptus, which creates an on-premise cloud that can be connected to the public cloud at Amazon because its APIs are compatible, doesn't need some bolstering for the job. It needs to scale better, Mickos said, and has to pay attention to latency, security and metering in that order.

Mårten's imminent arrival at Eucalyptus later this week gives the start-up two rich open source champions batting for it. Its public cloud widgetry is currently bundled with Canonical's latest Ubuntu Linux distribution and Canonical of course was started by South Africa's super-rich Mark Shuttleworth.

Mårten is also on the board of the web-based cloud management firm RightScale as well as Mozilla Messaging and Electrosonic.