Nimbula releases new version of its cloud OS, targets $4B market

Nimbula, a company ties together public and private cloud resources in a way that companies can manage them easily, this week released the latest version of its software.

Nimbula calls itself a cloud operating system — because it helps its corporate customers manage their various cloud assets — private, public, and hybrid — from one place, with a single login. It’s new product is called the Nimbula Director 1.5.

Chief executive Chris Pinkham stopped by VentureBeat‘s office recently for an interview (see video above).

He said there’s been a lot of talk about the “hybrid cloud,” but it’s been just that. Until now, no one has really been able to do it well. While gaming company Zynga was a front-runner, and built a hybrid cloud internally — because of the huge cloud computing needs of its popular social games, Nimbula is one of the first to offer it to third parties, he said.

EMC, VMware and Citrix all offer products that require customers to rely system administrators to manage large installations, he said. But Nimbula removes that middleman, Pinkham explained, and allows companies to manage both public and private cloud computing and storage assets more simply (self-serve), and to scale them as needed. If customers want to keep existing infrastructure products, they can build upon that, say by adding public cloud infrastructure.

Competitors include Openstack and Eucalyptus.

This “infrastructure as a service” market is a $4 billion market, Pinkham said, citing Gartner research.

The company received $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia and Accel Partners last year.

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