Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, was named the Overall Most Innovative Cloud Provider at the UP 2011 Cloud Computing Conference yesterday. The conference was sponsored by IBM, Microsoft, PwC, EMC and Amazon Web Services and held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

There were 350 nominations for disruptive and next-generation cloud computing companies and for emerging solution providers who are defining cloud technology for the UP 2011 Awards. The judges included James Staten, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, Dave Bartoletti, Expert Analyst at Taneja Group, Jeff Nick, Senior VP and CTO at EMC, and Clemente Cohen, Senior VP at CA Technologies.

"Winning this award speaks to the innovation and deep technical differentiation Nimbula brings to the market," said Reza Malekzadeh, VP of Marketing at Nimbula. "This year we brought our product to market and experienced accelerated growth. This award underscores our position as the most innovative and robust choice for building private or public cloud infrastructures."

Nimbula's flagship product, Nimbula Director, abstracts the underlying technology to present a coherent view of a completely automated compute and storage cloud. Providing a one-stop virtual data center management solution, Nimbula Director isolates customers from the operational and hardware complexity associated with deploying a private or public cloud.

Nimbula Director is used both by enterprises and service providers. Enterprises leverage Nimbula Director for a variety of reasons: to create and deliver their own private cloud for development and testing of applications, for hosting their next generation applications (web 2.0, e-commerce, large scale applications, etc.) or for controlled use of public clouds through Nimbula Director's unique federation functionality. Service Providers leverage Nimbula Director to stand up their own public cloud infrastructure.