Abiquo went on a recent executive-hiring tear, announcing the addition of nine key executives, coming from VMWare, Citrix, and CA Technologies.

The company has a vision of virtualized infrastructure management based on open standards, and "envisions a future where private and public Clouds are fully interoperable and vendor neutral," according to its website. It is headquartered in Redwood City, CA with offices in Barcelona and London.

Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm will be speaking at the upcoming Cloud Expo, to be held June 6-9 at the Javits Center in New York.

So this seemed like a good time to ask him Three Questions.

1. Abiquo focuses on what it calls "Resource Cloud." What is that and why is it important?

Pete. The Resource Cloud is a concept to highlight operational separation between physical infrastructure and virtualized applications.    In "Virtualization 1.0" environments, this separation is fuzzy - for example provisioning of virtual resources is carried out by the IT infrastructure team, which leads to delays, inefficiency, and unnecessary resource consumption. The clear separation afforded by Abiquo's resource cloud eliminates these problems.

2. Although headquartered in Silicon Valley, Abiquo has deep European roots. To what degree does this differentiate the company and inflect its vision?

Pete. Abiquo is differentiated not by the geography of its development operations, but by the quality of its product and the experience of its teams.   That said, developing our product in Europe has given us a more international outlook, for example in our user interface which is already localized into multiple European languages, as well as Japanese.

Being "hidden away" in Europe also enabled us to quietly develop our product in collaboration with large enterprise customers and MSPs before launching on the wider market. This clearly shows in our product's maturity.

3. What can we expect from your keynote speech at Cloud Expo in New York in June?

Pete. At the last Cloud Expo in November, we introduced practical "business policy" to the audience, describing the significance of the "defining moment" at which a virtual asset is deployed in the physical infrastructure.

This is the moment at which issues like efficiency, cost reduction, security, compliance and governance are all determined - and whether the promises of virtualization and the cloud stand or fail. At Cloud Expo New York you can expect us to build on this theme, further extending our thought leadership.

Do you have a question for Pete Malcolm or Abiquo? Go to www.twitter.com/abiquo

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