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Nebula is an OpenStack cloud company that was founded by Chris Kemp, the former CTO of NASA and one of founders of OpenStack itself. In September 2013, Kemp brought Gordon Stitt, the former CEO of Extreme Networks, onboard to become the new CEO of Nebula.
In a video interview with eWEEK, the two Nebula leaders discuss their plans for scaling their business in the growing OpenStack cloud market.
Stitt said that Nebula’s strategy has always been about connecting existing enterprise infrastructure with OpenStack. The core focus for Nebula is on enabling private clouds for enterprise deployments.
Under Stitt’s leadership, Nebula is targeting specific market verticals, rather than just taking a broad market approach. Government, Higher Education and Financial Services are areas where Nebula is seeing success already.
“The mantra of Nebula from the beginning, and we’ve now really turned the volume up on it, is that it needs to be turnkey,” Stitt said.
The Nebula One controller is the company’s primary product and delivers a turnkey OpenStack appliance that can enable an enterprise private cloud deployment.
Nebula isn’t the first startup company that Stitt has led. Stitt was the co-founder and CEO of Extreme Networks from 1996 until 2006. There are some similarities and some differences for Stitt from the early days of Extreme Networks and his job now at Nebula.
“The market for switches was well understood at the time, and customers knew what a switch was,” Stitt said. “In this case [Nebula], the market is still very early and a lot of people don’t understand OpenStack and don’t understand the concept of private clouds.”
For Kemp, the founder of Nebula, having Stitt take over the role of CEO has meant that he has been able to focus on meeting with customers and determining strategy.
Watch the full video interview with Gordon Stitt (pictured, left), CEO of Nebula, and Chris Kemp (pictured, right), founder of Nebula, below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist