EDA has yet another cloud computing participant, but this is of a different flavor from what we’ve seen before. While most efforts to date have been to make tools available in the cloud, IPextreme has opened an IP portal called Xena. The idea is to create an IP store so that customers can browse IP and purchase from Xena merchants. Use of the site is free to those customers; it’s the IP vendors that pay for the subscription.

Security is always the big issue for anything cloudy, and Xena is therefore available both in a public cloud version and in an “enterprise” version, which gets implemented on an internal private cloud. The details of the public cloud implementation are being kept pretty quiet “… for security reasons. Companies will received a private machine with its own private IP address, and IPextreme will manage that machine, while the company will manage their customers and business on that platform,” according to CEO Warren Savage.

Even the hosting of the public cloud is vague. IPextreme does some hosting of its own, and some of it falls to “the usual suspects.” But they say that this detail will be completely transparent to customers. My guess is that IPextreme has some machines of its own that it can use for free, and that it can add incremental capacity from the merchant cloud market if needed, and that it has infrastructure software to manage all that. But that’s only my guess.

More info on their release…