That image converter is built into Eucalyptus itself, but there was some interest from the VMware people and from other folks in being able to do that conversion outside of Eucalyptus as part of the debugging and development process. If you are thinking about using Eucalyptus and you've got a Xen image or a KVM image, you're going to want a way to make a VMware image out of that. We can do it internally, but as you are doing development, you may want to do it externally.

Why is public API support for Amazon AWS important?

One of the reasons is, it looks to us anyway, that the future of large-scale computing is going to be centered around the combination of on-premise resources (resources you have purchased and run on your own premises) and the ability to rent public cloud resources (either dynamically or on a monthly basis).

There's a great deal of value in the public clouds -- the price point is very attractive for some things, you can use them and stop using them at will. There's a great deal of value to on-premise resources -- people have resources in their data centre for very good legitimate business reasons. What we're hearing is that the future really is the ability to combine both of those things.

If you are going to combine them, it is really important that the platform you use looks the same to your users and your applications, regardless of whether you are using the on-premise resources or the cloud resources.