NetApp Acquires Third Company This Year: GreenQloud

NetApp, Inc. discreetly acquired Greenqloud, even not publishing a press release on the subject.

It’s its historically the 19th acquisition of the storage giant, and, for the first time, the firm buys three companies in one year all of them for undisclosed amount. The other ones last May being Plexistor, in software that turns off-the-shelf servers into high-performance converged infrastructure offerings with persistent memory technologies, and Immersive Partner Solutions, with cloud-based converged infrastructure monitoring and compliance.

The price for GreenQloud was probably a small sum as the start-up, founded in 2010, raised little funding from investors including NSA Ventures, Novator Partners, Keel Invest, Inc. (new venture fund of Iceland), founders and employees, Kelly Ireland, founder and CEO, and US system integrator CB Technologies, who invested last August $4 million in the company.

The firm, headquartered in Reykjavik, with an office in Kirkland, WA, and founded in 2010, also received an undisclosed amount of funding in October 2014.

In 2015 the private company launched a beta version of Qstack, a cloud management platform for all private and hybrid cloud needs.

With Qstack, enterprises are able to implement and manage large scale cloud environments and consolidate their IT infrastructure management through a single, browser-based UI, to providing customers with the flexibility to choose the platform and location for their workloads. Whether on premise or in a public cloud. Qstack helps customers adapt to changing priorities and future needs without vendor lock-in.

For NetApp, Greenqloud will reinforce Data Fabric and provide a scalable architecture enhancing ability to integrate and deliver cloud data services.

Qstack supports a range of hypervisors such as KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, Scality, VMWare vSphere and Xen.

The popularity of the product led to partnership with giants like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi, Microsoft, Netapp and VMWare, as well as Scality.

Last March the software company announced that Intel Data Center Manager (DCM) will be integrated into Qstack from June 2017.

Premis and Greenqloud signed a reseller partnership and user contract for Qstack.

Last March was announced that Elton Technologies, a system integrator in UK, Europe, Middle East and Asia, will be offering Qstack to their customers.

Among customers there are CCP, and Vodafone Iceland, telecommunication company running its services in a multi data-center environment.

Jonsi Stefansson served as GreenQloud’s CEO since 2014. Prior to that, he was a member of the company’s board of directors. He has more than 20 years of international management experience across the IT sector, holding roles in product development, operations, data center management and design. Most notably, he spent 7 years at IBM and then later at Nyherji (IBM Iceland), where he worked as a certified AIX technical expert and TSM certified consultant for Iceland, USA, UK and Denmark. He held technical director roles at both Vivaldi Technologies and Opera Software where he led the growth of hosted solutions – development and operations – for 5 years for products including, Opera Mini, Opera Turbo and My Opera which had 350 million of active users combined globally. He is also currently a board member of several companies. He is now VP cloud services for NetApp.