GreenQloud

Founded in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 2010 by Eirikur Hrafnsson and Tryggvi Larusson, GreenQloud began its journey with a distinct focus on environmental sustainability. The company initially offered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products, including 'Compute Qloud' and 'Storage Qloud', which were rough equivalents to Amazon's EC2 and S3 offerings. A core differentiator was its operational base in Icelandic data centers, powered entirely by renewable geothermal energy, a strategic choice that underscored its 'green' branding.

The company's trajectory pivoted in 2014 when Jonsi Stefansson, previously a board member, took the helm as CEO. Under his leadership, GreenQloud transitioned from a public cloud provider to a pure software company. This strategic shift involved discontinuing its IaaS offerings in 2015 to concentrate exclusively on developing its cloud management platform, Qstack. Qstack was built to address the growing need for hybrid cloud management, allowing enterprises and service providers to manage their entire data center portfolio, including multiple public and private clouds, from a single self-service portal. The platform is hypervisor-agnostic, supporting VMware, KVM, Hyper-V, and bare-metal provisioning, providing clients with flexibility and preventing vendor lock-in.

Qstack's architecture enables users to manage multi-cloud environments across different geographical zones through one unified interface. Key features include built-in metering and analytics, resource isolation, and a Kubernetes-based engine for container and application orchestration. This focus on sophisticated orchestration and management software attracted significant attention, including from major industry players. The company's business model revolved around selling Qstack as a turnkey software solution, along with support, technical services, and certifications. This strategic move culminated in a significant milestone in August 2017, when GreenQloud was acquired by the Fortune 500 company NetApp for $51 million in cash, becoming NetApp Iceland. This event marked the first acquisition of an Icelandic startup by a Fortune 500 company.

Keywords: cloud management, hybrid cloud, Qstack, NetApp Iceland, IaaS, private cloud, multi-cloud management, cloud orchestration, data center management, infrastructure management, Kubernetes, geothermal energy, renewable energy cloud, virtual machine management, Eirikur Hrafnsson, Tryggvi Larusson, Jonsi Stefansson, cloud automation, bare-metal provisioning, hypervisor agnostic, cloud services, IT infrastructure