Q&A: Reza Malekzadeh, vice president of marketing at Nimbula

Nimbula is a two-year old start-up company from the US. It was founded by the two men who built Amazon's Elastic Cloud (EC2) but, despite its success, they wanted to find a way to bring the same benefits of the public cloud infrastructure behind the firewall for enterprise customers.

With a public cloud history and a private cloud future, Nimbula knows its cloud computing.

The company's vice president of marketing, Reza Malekzadeh, is best known for being the first non-engineer employee at VMware, and played a major role in the company's launch.

Just before his new venture launches its product in Europe, IT PRO got some time time with the executive at VMWorld 2010 - a show he used to organise - to talk all things cloud.

How have cloud computing adoption levels changed over the past year?

It depends on what you call cloud computing but what we have seen fairly dramatically is the [increaded] use of public cloud infrastructure. We have seen that it allows people to do things they couldn't do before and [enables] innovations [not possible] before.

With web companies, such as DropBox, which are entirely built on [public cloud] infrastructure... it has shown that you can very easily build up and use a service, scale it up as you have demand and really focus on the innovation you want to bring to the market rather than actual machines.

That, I think, has been proving some of the benefits that the infrastructure as a service public cloud brings.

People are interested in that but, to a large extent, enterprise customers still have a lot of concerns about putting their data out [there], whether it is because they already have investments in hardware or they have issues around security and compliance or legal reasons.

There are a variety of reason why private infrastructure still has its place. I think that it is still the very early days of enterprise customers adopting the cloud.