Two years ago Juan Carlos, an engineer at Spanish software company Ackstorm was trying to build a cloud computing service. But to make it possible he had to build some software so he could manage and monitor the resulting infrastructure. As he did this, he realized that a few tweaks and some capital could turn his efforts into a stand-alone business.
So he spun out ECmanaged from Ackstorm and launched earlier this year. The company has raised €200,000 from Ackstorm and is nearing a close on a €700,000 investment from the Spanish government. It is also looking at venture capital as an option, something it may find as one of the Structure:Europe Launchpad finalists.
With its beginnings as a spin out, ECmanaged is in good company with other European startups such as Carriots, Xively, Gigaset and even its fellow Launchpad finalist SecludIT which spun out of a research institution. As for its business, it plans to work with Spanish companies as well as those in other regions, including the U.S.
Joeri Hamvas, communications manager at ECmanaged, told me that in Europe customers are using infrastructure and platforms provided by OVH, 1and1, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and CloudSigma. That’s a lot of variety and he expects companies to use ECmanaged to take advantage of more than one of them to avoid vendor lock-in and keep their options open in case of a failure.
He wrote in an email that,”cross-provider mobility is not only to move from one provider to another. An even better, or shall we say pioneering, use of this mobility is to work simultaneously with different providers.”
One reason they might do this is because some vendors might be trusted with certain data over other vendors. Another might be the cost or availability of certain features. The company has paying customers and offers its online application in several languages. It competes with a variety of other offerings from RightScale to Cloudability.
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