Eucalyptus Systems, the specialist in delivering private cloud software, has raised $20M in round of VC financing that takes its total funding now to $25.5M. The news comes hard on the heels of the announcement - in March 2010 - of Mårten Mickos as the company's CEO.

Mickos, formerly CEO of MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun in January 2008, is also one of the distinguished members of the Speaker Faculty at the upcoming Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (November 1-4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The event, which is the 7th Cloud Expo in an international series that has been growing in lockstep with the Enterprise IT use of Cloud Computing, is expected to attract more delegates even than the recent New York event, 5th Cloud Expo, which had 3,500+ attendees.



Eucalyptus is an open source solution that originates from an NSF funded research project at University of California, Santa Barbara. The research group that eventually designed and built Eucalyptus was headed up by Prof. Rich Wolski, who has spoken at several Cloud Expos in the past including, most recently, in Washington DC where he gave a riveting fast-paced presentation on the open-source infrastructure for cloud computing.

Based on open-source software components used without modification, Eucalyptus can run in pre-existing Linux installations without the addition or modification of the installed software infrastructure.

In early January of 2009, those behind Eucalyptus began the process of commercializing the project as an open source company. The original authors of the Eucalyptus software were unanimous in their desire to see the project continue to have impact on the open-source community and the interest from both public and private sectors in seeing Eucalyptus persist beyond its University origins made the transition possible.