The people behind Metacloud have a lot of experience in managing clouds. Co-founder Sean Lynch managed the private cloud for Ticketmaster. CEO and co-founder Steve Curry ran Yahoo's global storage team. No less than Jerry Yang himself invested in Metacloud, based on the business model and Lynch and Curry.
I had a chance to sit down and speak with Sean and Steve as they announced the company coming out of stealth. You can listen in on our conversation below. It is only about 15 minutes long, so shouldn't take too much time.
The idea behind Metacloud, though, is that OpenStack makes it reasonable to set up a private cloud virtually (pun intended) anywhere. Metacloud has customized their distribution of OpenStack based upon their own R&D. They will install it where you tell them you want it on your own equipment. They then manage your cloud infrastructure for you, so you don't have to. Managed Private Cloud as a Service is what they call it.
To me it makes sense. In an age where everything can be consumed as a service, why shouldn't your cloud be managed as a service as well?
I asked Sean and Steve about the recent reports of OpenStack not gaining as much traction as fast as some would like. They think it is just the usual hype cycle stuff and that long-term OpenStack will be very successful, and will eventually become the standard.
They also believe that the private cloud will always exist and will not be swallowed up by public clouds. There might be a lot of hybrid clouds that leverage both public and private cloud infrastructures in the future. Metacloud may offer some of that one day. But right now they are focused on private cloud deployments.