GoGrid announces its Cloudcenter Application Programming Interface (API) under a share-alike Creative Commons license. This allows developers, system integrators among others to copy, modify, distribute and republish their cloud computing API with attribution to GoGrid. This is a big move from GoGrid. However, this was anticipated because of the intense competition from Amazon limiting the business opportunities to GoGrid in the current economic conditions.
GoGrid‘s key strategic differentiators among its competitors (mainly Amazon), when it started, were: support for MS Windows OS and an intuitive GUI console based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT). However, both these differentiators were neutralized by Amazon by launching Amazon Web Services (AWS) Console and supporting MS Windows on Amazon EC2. By going open, GoGrid competes directly with cloud enabling software providers such as 3Tera, open source Enomaly, Citrix C3, VMware vCloud/VDCOS and Elastra among others. However, it will be interesting to see the ramifications of this move over time in the cloud computing space and whether going open would bring any new business opportunities to GoGrid in the current economy.
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