Is someone going to step in and provide commercial support for the Eucalyptus open-source project basically following the Red Hat model which made Linux commercially successful and generated good revenue for Red Hat?

Here’s what I am thinking based on what I saw and heard at the Cloud Computing Expo (see my notes here):

1. We know that Amazon’s Web Services are rapidly becoming the de-facto industry standard for cloud infrastructure.
2. The biggest complaints that people have against them are that they are only provided by Amazon, and thus lock you in one vendor and do not support the “private” clouds (on-premise deployment).
3. Both of these could potentially be addressed by the Eucalyptus project which implements EC2 and (in the next release) S3 APIs and can be used on hardware of your choice.
4. Eucalyptus team is not planning to use their project commercially and Rich Wolski is skeptical about competing against Amazon.
5. The project is open source.

In my mind this means that there is significant unsatisfied demand and a technology which someone could use to satisfy it. So my expectation is that we will see someone doing that. If not now then in next year when Eucalyptus is more feature-complete and stable (which is expected in the Spring).

Heck, this could be a very interesting play by Citrix considering that both Amazon and Citrix are using XEN, and Citrix is now trying hard to move beyond terminal access to virtualization and cloud space…

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