Maureen O'Gara

Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud platform partnered with Amazon to give people hybrid clouds, has found selling support and professional services, the usual way an open source company makes money, isn't working as a business because would-be customers are too tight-fisted.

As a result it didn't grow as much as expected last year.

So it's regrouping. It's open sourcing its services and training, CEO Marten Mickos said, to focus on its product business, where it's seeing early indications of large cloud implementations and the potential for a big business thanks in part to its alliance with Amazon, whose APIs are the recognized cloud standard.

Initial contracts brought in $50,000-$100,000 apiece, he said. Amazon is helping a bit, but Eucalyptus is doing most of its own lead generation. Consulting contracts, evidently few and far between, averaged around $20,000.

For those who don't ask Eucalyptus is saying that it believes it needs to be "wide open" to get back to the true philosophy and roots of open source that puts "open" above dollars.

Anyway, professional services consulting will move away from intellectual property development towards customer enablement. Eucalyptus will publish all generic materials associated with customer engagement (the ones that don't expose sensitive customer information).

It's removing the authorized course requirement historically needed to take a Eucalyptus certification exam and making all certification items available to the general public as study tools prior to taking an exam. It says it's confident the move "will make the EUCA3 test one of the most sought-after, highly valued credentials in cloud computing."

All Eucalyptus professional courseware will be available at their usual repository in GitHub, including an unrestricted PDF of all course materials and source file access to all support resources.

Eucalyptus will no longer run a formal authorized training partner program - anyone who wants to learn or teach these materials are free to do so.

The cloud merchant still has consultants such as Wipro, DLT and Infosys representing its widgetry.

The company also gets "really smart product feedback from its installed base," Marten said, and Eucalyptus is intent on building a "really smart" product. Fast-moving start-ups are using Amazon and the Eucalyptus cloud needs to reflect that speed.

Marten says Eucalyptus' open source rival OpenStack is weighed down by complexity and the internal wariness of its contending supporters. The market and the technology aren't ready for wide adoption.

Eucalyptus claims 100 paying customers.