Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating. The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source private cloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

“Eucalyptus Systems will ensure the viability and growth of Eucalyptus well beyond its life as a university research project, while also extending the technology to meet the needs of organizations that require high scalability, reliability, and enterprise-grade support,” said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “Eucalyptus Systems will enable businesses of any size to leverage their own IT resources to get the benefits of cloud computing without the concerns of lock-in, security ambiguity, and unexpected storage costs that can be associated with public clouds.”

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

“We are excited to partner with Benchmark Capital as we launch Eucalyptus Systems,” said co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins. “Benchmark has a history of successful collaboration with open source companies, and we are pleased that Eucalyptus Systems will join MySQL, Xen, and Zimbra as a Benchmark company.”

“Eucalyptus Systems is a pioneer in open source cloud computing, bringing together some of the industry’s most promising technologies to enable major IT cost savings and efficiencies,” commented Kevin Harvey, general partner at Benchmark Capital. “The Eucalyptus management team includes some of the most accomplished and experienced engineers in the field of cloud computing, and I look forward to working with them as they bring the benefits of secure, private cloud computing to the enterprise.”