Startup Of The Week: EnomalyStartup Of The Week: Enomaly

For IT departments that like the idea of cloud computing but are held back by security, governance, or other concerns, Enomaly makes it possible to create cloud-like environments in corporate data centers. The company's Elastic Computing Platform 2.1 originated as an open source project that recently morphed into a commercial offering.
--John Foley ENOMALY

HEADQUARTERS: Toronto

PRODUCT: Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform, virtual infrastructure management software

PRINCIPALS: Reuven Cohen, co-founder, CEO, and CTO; George Bazos, co-founder, president, and COO; Lars-Erik Forsberg, co-founder

INVESTORS: Privately held

FUNDING: Intel, France Telecom

EARLY CUSTOMERS: Computer Troubleshooters, SupportSpace

ELASTICITY CEO Cohen uses the term "elastic computing" to describe IT environments that meld on-premises and remote systems--including cloud services--in a single, secure infrastructure. Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform lets IT administrators provision, manage, and monitor virtual servers, and it supports load balancing and automatic scaling. THE CODE Originally created as an open source project called Enomalism, Enomaly relaunched its technology as Elastic Computing Platform 2.1 in October. It includes a wizard for virtual server configuration, an application repository, Web services API, and an administrative dashboard. Among the new features are support for Amazon's EC2 and commercial hypervisors. Enomaly ECP is available at no cost under the Affero GPL or through an enterprise license that starts at $1,000 per server, depending on support level. COMMUNITY There are about 15,000 users of Enomaly's platform. In September, the company co-sponsored a cloud computing interoperability forum. Cohen blogs on cloud computing at ElasticVapor.com. OUR TAKE With all the interest in cloud computing, Enomaly seems to have the right product at the right time. It has four years of experience under its belt--mostly as a services company--and some impressive early customers. Yet, Enomaly has only 16 employees, and the management team, though technically deep, is relatively light on experience in the enterprise software market. Potential customers should try before they buy. Download its free software first, then sign an enterprise license if all goes well. TIMELINE