Deutsche Telekom spawns cloud vendor Zimory

commentary

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has issued a plea for more enterprises to contribute to open-source communities. Deutsche Telekom Laboratories has gone one step further: it has spun off its own open-source cloud-computing start-up called Zimory.

Based in Berlin, Zimory aims to help bring the benefits of cloud computing to private enterprises, but with a twist that InternetNews.com calls out: enabling "a cloud-computing marketplace that matches buyers and sellers of distributed computing power."

In other words, Zimory's open-source code enables not only private clouds, but also the ability to profit from under-utilized cloud resources in much the same way that Amazon has opened up its excess computing capacity through services like its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

(Credit: Zimory)

The code powering the service is "completely open source," according to the company's chief technology officer. This is critical to making the service work:

"The Zimory Agent needs to be widely distributed, as many organizations that run the open-source hypervisors do not have sophisticated management frameworks," (Zimory CTO Maximilian) Ahrens said. "Therefore, it is key for us that we can distribute our Agent through the open-source community."

Part distribution strategy, part software development strategy (Zimory uses an array of third-party open-source code to build its service), open source is fundamental to Zimory. However, the model's magic is in connecting disparate computing needs and resources, which is a "proprietary" service that only Zimory will be able to manage through its cloud infrastructure. It's a very smart idea.

Even Microsoft agrees. It named Zimory to its select German incubator program.