Nimbula, the company founded by two engineers who were part of the original Amazon EC2 team, today announced that they have raised 15 Million in Series B round of financing. This round was mainly lead by Accel partners. Nimbula was launched in last Structure conference and offers private cloud with Amazon like scalability. This round of funding takes the total funding to $20 Million and it will help them push market adoption of their product.

Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, today announced that it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. Current investor Sequoia Capital, which led Nimbula’s first round of venture financing, also participated in this round. In addition, Nimbula announced that Accel Partners’ Ping Li has joined the company’s board of directors. The new funding will be used to continue the company’s investment in innovation around hybrid cloud computing technologies and to drive market adoption of Nimbula’s product offering for the management of on- and off-premises infrastructure.
Nimbula is being touted as Cloud Operating System by its founder. It installs on bare metal allowing a heterogenous configuration. It completely abstracts away the underlying complexity and offers a coherent view of the automated virtual data center. It offers both a command line interface and a web interface which which, through a REST API, manages all aspects of the cloud. integrates a hypervisor (KVM and/or Xen) with node management software on each node to automate both the deployment and configuration. Unlike Amazon EC2 which is tied to a specific hypervisor, Nimbula tries to make hypervisor irrelevant. Users will be able to have an heterogenous mix without worrying about playing nice with a particular hypervisor. Even though they support only Xen and KVM at this moment, they are planning to add support for other hypervisors soon.
I am a bit surprised by the kind of funding they have received. This market segment is very crowded with different players trying to position themselves with very little differentiation. It will be interesting to see where Nimbula goes from here. This funding round will help them gain traction in the hybrid cloud market which will remain hot for the next few years.
Krishnan Subramanian

Krish dons several avatars including entrepreneur in exile, analyst cum researcher, technology evangelist, blogger, ex-physicist, social/political commentator, etc.. My main focus is research and analysis on various high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. I also evangelize Open Source and Cloud Computing in various media outlets, blogs and other public forums. I offer strategic advise to both Cloud Computing and Open Source providers and, also, help other companies take advantage of Open Source and Cloud Computing. In my opinion, Open Source commoditized software and Cloud Computing commoditized computing resources. A combination of these two developments offers a strong competitive advantage to companies of all sizes and shapes. Due to various factors, including fear, the adoption of both Open Source and Cloud Computing are relatively slow in the business sector. So, I take it upon myself to clear any confusion in this regard and educate, enrich and advise users/customers to take advantage of the benefits offered by these technologies. I am also a managing partner in two consulting companies based in India. I blog about Open Source topics at http://open.krishworld.com and Cloud Computing related topics at http://www.cloudave.com.

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