Some interesting news in the world of startups and big cloud providers today. Verizon Communications announced it has acquired CloudSwitch, a Burlington, MA-based software startup, for an undisclosed price. CloudSwitch will be combined with Verizon’s Terremark IT services division, the company said, as it tries to take a “step forward in defining the enterprise cloud.”
CloudSwitch started in 2008 and raised a little over $15 million from venture investors including Atlas Venture, Matrix Partners, and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The startup was co-founded by Ellen Rubin and John Considine. In early 2010, my colleague Wade profiled the trials and tribulations of CloudSwitch as it went through beta trials of its software tool, which creates a temporary work space on a cloud service (like Amazon’s EC2) where companies can run virtualized applications as if they were still running on their home infrastructure.
There are plenty of startups and well-established companies trying to solve this problem, which still stands in the way of a lot of big companies moving their workloads to the Internet cloud.
“Our founding vision has always been to create a seamless and secure federation of cloud environments across enterprise data centers and global cloud services,” said CloudSwitch CEO John McEleney, in a statement. “Together, we will be able to provide enterprises with an unmatched level of flexibility, scalability and control in the cloud.”
New York-based Verizon (NYSE: [[ticker:VZ]]) is better known for its wireless network and broadband Internet services. But it has been making inroads in cloud computing lately and wants to own its fair share of the enterprise cloud—whatever that might end up looking like.
