News

Microsoft Acquires Cloud Company GreenButton

• By Kurt Mackie
• May 01, 2014

Microsoft has acquired GreenButton, a New Zealand-based provider of cloud integration solutions, for an undisclosed amount.

GreenButton makes application programming interfaces for cloud computing platforms. The company will join the Microsoft Azure team as part of the acquisition's terms. A new integrated product with Microsoft Azure is planned for launch later this year, but GreenButton is no longer serving new customers.

GreenButton currently has three products. Its Cloud Fabric product is designed for independent software vendors and enterprises to more easily move their applications and tap cloud computing resources. The Cloud Fabric product is platform "agnostic" and works with Amazon Web Services as well as Windows Azure. GreenButton also makes a CloudSync component for the Cloud Fabric product, which is used for synchronizing large datasets. There's also a WarpDrive solution for transferring large files over wide area networks.

The company's solutions are designed to help plug an organization's applications into various Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms, according to a GreenButton FAQ.

GreenButton abstracts the setup, management, configuration and technical understanding required to run applications on IaaS platforms. The GreenButton’s cloud-agnostic solution enables services to be sourced from any IaaS provider – without changing front end software.

GreenButton has about 20 employees with two other offices on top of its New Zealand headquarters. One of the offices is located in Seattle and one in Palo Alto, Calif. Its customers include the animation industry (Pixar), biotech companies (Biomatters), financial organizations and engineering companies. It claims to have "thousands of customers in over 72 countries." GreenButton was the 2011 Microsoft Azure ISV software partner of the year.

In announcing the acquisition on Thursday, Microsoft described GreenButton's solutions as making it easier for organizations to run "compute-intensive workloads in the cloud."

"Using GreenButton’s solutions, applications can be cloud-enabled quickly without recoding existing software -- and without a PhD in computer science," Microsoft's announcement stated.

Microsoft's high-performance computing team said in a blog post that Microsoft has been "big fans of GreenButton's Cloud Fabric service built on Microsoft Azure, and the end-to-end user experience they have built."