Eucalyptus, provider of open source software for private clouds, has confirmed two executive departures. CEO Marten Mickos downplayed the changes to GigaOm, but Talkin' Cloud has heard about other employee departures in recent months.
Among those exiting: Co-founder Rich Wolski and Senior VP of Worldwide Sales Said Ziouani, a Red Hat veteran.
Eucalyptus is one of the better-known players in the private cloud software market. The big idea: Offer private cloud software that's API (application programming interface) compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In theory, that means customers can easily move workloads between the AWS public cloud and Eucalyptus private clouds.
Venture capitalists love the concept and Mickos' leadership. The company in 2012 raised $30 million in series C funding, with many venture capitalists betting that Mickos can build Eucalyptus into the top open source cloud platform, much in the way that he previously built MySQL into a top open source database (at least until Sun acquired that company).
Still, Eucalyptus faces plenty of competition from multiple OpenStack distributions, and potential threats from CloudStack and OpenNebula.
The GigaOm article accurately points out that there are a lot of open source cloud platforms chasing an emerging market opportunity filled with confused customers.
Were the Eucalyptus executive departures a simple case of employees making independent career changes? Or is something larger going on?