Six months ago at Cloud Expo 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif., when TMCnet sat down with Nimbula –a cloud operating system company that was founded by the people that developed the Amazon EC2 public cloud service – the hot button items on the expo floor were the transition from a traditional virtualization environment in which everything goes through central administration to a self-service environment.

A few months later, however, the market has matured substantially and now the conversations are less about education and more about transitioning and implementation, according to Nimbula.

“It seems the adoption is happening now and starting to mature,” Reza Malekzadeh, vice president of marketing for Nimbula, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo East 2012 yesterday. “Whereas people were trying to learn six months ago, now there is definite progress.”

Nimbula delivers a new class of cloud infrastructure and services system that combines the flexibility, scalability and operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of today’s most advanced data centers, according to company officials.

Its flagship product, Nimbula Director, provides a cost-effective and secure way to build and manage clouds with global reach and scale.

The first half of 2012 has been particularly momentous for Nimbula as the company has increased its customer footprint and enhanced its offerings. Most recently, the company announced Nimbula Director 2.0, the latest version of its main offering.

Nimbula’s latest version boasts: an extensible cloud platform; EC2-style cloud with support of the ESXi hypervisor and Cloud Foundry; application management, or the orchestration of complex applications; DNS and VPN Services; and enterprise readiness. While at Cloud Expo this week, Nimbula has been demoing Version 2.0 for the first time and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.

“We have continued growing the product and have continued delivering on our own version of innovation,” Malekzadeh said. “We have now defined complete sets of rules and polices around how a policy needs to operate and underlying cloud infrastructure will monitor that and remediate it if there are any issues.”

“The response to the latest version has been rather positive because people can see the product and see that technology and its implementation matter,” he added.

As part of the latest version, Nimbula has also decided to make this version more user-friendly as customers can download the solution right from the website, without ever having to speak to an actual sales person.

For Nimbula, a company that was founded three years ago, maintaining its competitive edge is no big deal for the provider and that’s in large part due its vision, according to officials.

“Our vision makes us different,” Malekzadeh said. “Our vision is to provide an architecture that can scale and even though today not everyone might have large scale products and people might just be starting on projects, we believe that if you want to scale tomorrow you have to have the right things in place from the beginning.”

While at Cloud Expo, Nimbula showed its continued commitment to enhancing its offerings with the announcement that Nimbula has teamed with UShareSoft, a provider of a cloud software factory and app store platform, to simplify enterprise application delivery to private and hybrid clouds by integrating UShareSoft's UForge with Nimbula Director. The partnership helps joint customers improve business agility by providing automation and self-service capabilities across not only compute, network and storage resources, but also software and applications, according to company officials.

As Nimbula looks ahead to 2012, the company predicts that the market will talk less about open source as the way to go and more about what products are really working.

“When it comes to customers, what they care about is that the product functions,” Malekzadeh said. “Clearly you do not want to lock your customers into architecture. You want the API to be freely available and anyone should be able to take technology. I see some people who had the open source belief six months ago who have changed their mind because they tried open source and it didn’t work.” 

“Implementation matters and that’s something I am struggling to get people to talk more about because people always talk about open source,” he added. “But, if there’s no product that works, then there’s no product that works.”