Hi Domenico,
This is quite a long email, so please bear with me... I have some exciting news that I’ve had to keep quiet about until now - but I can finally share it with you!
What's the news?
We have just acquired SolusVM, the virtual server management system. The SolusVM team and the SolusVM product are now part of the OnApp family. You can read more about it here , and register for our webinar to find out more.
But first, let me give you a quick overview.
Why have we done this?
SolusVM is a very different product to OnApp. It’s focused on simple, no-frills VM deployment - no failover, no autoscaling, no storage flexibility, no CDN... I could go on… but for the bare-bones VPS market, where people just want to spin up a VM, it’s a a perfect platform.
In that way it's a great complement to OnApp, and in fact we have many customers running both systems side-by-side already, targeting different parts of the market at different price points. We're not going to change that. SolusVM and OnApp will be developed, sold and supported separately, to meet those different market needs.
And...
That's pretty cool. But this is even better. While we’re not planning to change the scope of SolusVM, we are going to enable SolusVM to access OnApp Federation infrastructure.
In other words, we’re going to give a couple of thousand SolusVM hosts – and hundreds of thousands of Solus VMs – the ability to deploy on OnApp cloud infrastructure, anywhere in the world. The SolusVM community is an awesome, global community of hosts and end users who need infrastructure for VMs, and soon they'll be able to buy it through the OnApp Federation.
Why does this change everything?
The OnApp Federation is a new type of marketplace. When you're building a new market you have to balance supply and demand, and so far we've focused mainly on the supply side - enabling hundreds of providers to contribute infrastructure. By welcoming the SolusVM community into the Federation, we're boosting the demand side too.
This is going to kickstart the OnApp ecosystem and create new opportunities for every member of the Federation, whether you're selling capacity, or using OnApp with federated cloud or CDN resources, or using SolusVM + federation to create your own Digital Ocean/Linode service.
The OnApp Federation is as game-changing for this market as Uber or AirBnB were for theirs. And now you're going to see the momentum really start to build. We hope to have SolusVM + Federation in beta before the end of the year.
Join our webinar to find out more
I’m sure you’ll have questions, and together with Phill Bandelow, SolusVM's founder (a great guy, who has joined us to continue developing the product) we’ll be running a webinar on 25th September where we’ll talk a bit more about the acquisition and answer any questions you have.
You can register for the webinar and ask questions here:
http://onapp.com/solusvm .
I look forward to telling you more!
Best,
Ditlev Bredahl
CEO, OnApp