Diego Marino and Xavier Fernández founded Abiquo in March 2006 to develop cloud management solutions. Abiquo envisions a future where private and public clouds are fully interoperable and vendor neutral. The company embraces an open-source model where both community users and commercial organizations can fully benefit from the Cloud.

In February 2010, Abiquo closed euro 1.5M in Series A funding led by Nauta Capital (euro 1M) and including Caja Navarra (CAN). CAN, who provided loan funding in January 2008, contributed a total amount of euro 441,000 (euro 241,000 new capital and euro 200,000 loan to equity conversion). Pete Malcolm, who was appointed CEO, invested euro 100,000.

In March 2010, Abiquo, launched as a U.S.-based company with $5.1 million in total new funding. The company has previously been operating in semi-stealth mode from its founding location in Barcelona, Spain. The funding includes a venture debt line worth $1.36 million from Kreos Capital. The state of Catalonia and the federal government of Spain also contributed $1.53 million in grants and soft loans, and angel investors contributed the remaining portion.

Abiquo has developed a number of breakthrough techniques to manage and secure Cloud computing. Since its first pre-release in April 2009, Abiquo has been extensively tested by the open source community and by many commercial organizations, including a number of Global 1000 companies. Enthusiastic support from its users, many of whom discontinued projects with other Cloud management vendors, allowed Abiquo to attract both internationally renowned management, and substantial funding.

Abiquo claims to be the first software provider offering enterprises a complete, hypervisor-agnostic, open source cloud infrastructure management solution designed to change the way IT organizations operate their virtualized environments, making them more elastic and cost-effective to run. Abiquo’s platform leverages a simple and easy-to-use graphical user interface and offers concurrent support of all major hypervisors – avoiding vendor lock-in for the customer.

AbiCloud’s open-source Cloud computing platform manages all aspects of Cloud IT infrastructure. AbiCloud users can manage and create public and private Clouds, provision IT resources, and automatically scale applications on-demand. AbiCloud is vendor neutral, providing concurrent support of all major hypervisors, as well industry standards such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Key features include multi-tenancy, delegated control, resource limits, workload policy, support for all common hypervisors, automatic conversion between all hypervisor types, appliance library, web-based context-aware GUI, simplicity of installation, flexible scalability, standards based, and advanced networking.

Abiquo provides class-leading features like virtual to virtual conversion, and is easy to implement and operate, liberating IT organizations from the drudgery of managing thousands of virtual machines, without relinquishing control of the physical infrastructure. Abiquo empowers authorized users and groups, by allowing them to manage their own virtual enterprises within allocated resource limits. New virtual machines or pre-built appliances can be deployed in seconds.

Abiquo supports all major hypervisors fully and simultaneously, and allows conversion of virtual machines from one hypervisor to another in any combination, completely eliminating vendor lock-in with a single drag and drop operation.

Abiquo provides multi-tenancy with full isolation, hierarchical user management and role-based permissions, allowing delegation of management tasks according to the organizations needs. Users can define CPU, memory and storage limits for each Virtual Enterprise, including both hard (enforced) and soft (warning) levels.

Abiquo automatically allocates virtual machines to physical servers according to defined workload policy. It supports public, shared and private libraries. Where permitted by role, users can capture and store virtual machine images, and even combine sets of VM images into a single appliance for easy re-deployment.

Abiquo can be fully installed on a live running system, irrespective of the hypervisors in use. Abiquo offers a Cloud Operator API, inspired by Sun Public Cloud, enabling an Operator to run a dynamic, scalable cloud that is configured based on automated capacity rules.

In February 2010, Abiquo formally released a Community Edition focusing on the open source community, and an Enterprise Edition to meet the needs of commercial organizations. The latest release, Abiquo 1.6, includes an industry-standard API for Cloud administration. Other key features include extended vendor independence support and enterprise-class network management and multi-datacenter remote services.

Competitors include Cloud.com (formerly VMOps), Eucalyptus, and Nimbula. Abiquo argues that none offer the full depth and breadth in enterprise cloud management as it does. Abiquo 1.6 is the only solution that supports all 6 hypervisors with V2V conversion (VMware ESX, ESXi, Virtual Box, KVM, Xen Community, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V). Abiquo is vendor independent and can convert one hypervisor to any other in a simple drag-and-drop operation. It has minimal provisioning effort, eliminates Virtual sprawl, employs Business not IT Policy, and is enterprise centric.

Announced customers include Nexica and Trovit.

Pete Malcolm, CEO (previously founder and CTO of Orchestria, which was acquired by CA in January 2009, Benchmark Capital Europe’s first EIR, and SVP of Business Management with CA)

Steve Soechtig, VP Global Sales (previously VP of Western Area Sales for CA and SVP of Sales and Services for Orchestria)

Trevor Chamberlain, VP Business Development (previously a member of the executive management team at PSS Systems and SVP of Marketing and Business Development at Orchestria)

Nick Wetton, VP Regional Sales (previously VP of Security Solution Sales at CA and SVP of worldwide sales at Orchestria)

Diego Parrilla, VP Product Management (previously a senior IT architect at The Server Labs and led professional services and software development and technical teams at Amplía Soluciones, Adecco Group, and Cortal Consors)

Xavier Fernandez, Co-founder and VP Engineering (previously a project manager, senior developer and Java developer for Everis Consulting Group)

Helena Torras, VP Operations (previously interim CEO of Abiquo and GM of SARDomus)