GreenButton

GreenButton

Former type	Subsidiary
Industry	Cloud computing
Fate	Acquired by Microsoft
Founded	Wellington, New Zealand (2006 (2006))
Founder	Scott Houston
Defunct	May 2, 2014 (2014-05-02)
Headquarters	Wellington, New Zealand, New Zealand
Key people	Marcel van den Assum (Chairman) Scott Houston (CEO) Dave Fellows (CTO)
Revenue	$1.5 million (2011)
Parent	Microsoft
Website	www.greenbutton.com

GreenButton was a New Zealand-based software firm specializing in cloud computing. The company specializes in the creation of cloud platforms for the improvement and dispatch of software and services, which helps Independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprises to move to the cloud. Founded in 2006, GreenButton is based in Wellington, New Zealand, with additional offices in Palo Alto, California and Seattle.

GreenButton was acquired by Microsoft on 2 May 2014; its technologies will be integrated into its existing Azure offering.

History

GreenButton was founded as InterGrid in 2006 in Wellington, New Zealand, to provide small scale customers with a seamless interface to access job processors. GreenButton's hybrid approach helps software vendors use cloud computing. The company had a total turnover of $1.5 million for the fiscal year 2011-12.

In June 2012, GreenButton announced a partnership with the GNS Science of New Zealand and American based Stillwater Group for the optimization of cloud computing during complex seismic processing. The company is currently developing a software solution called "Cloud Claritas", which integrates heavy seismic processing to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. Seismic processing is an integral part of the Oil and natural gas exploration process, and requires heavy processing of data.

On 2 May 2014, GreenButton announced its acquisition by Microsoft. While the company will retain its New Zealand-based staff, GreenButton's technology will be directly integrated into Microsoft Azure. As a result of the acquisition, GreenButton immediately stopped accepting new customers on the same day.

Recognition

GreenButton is a member of the Microsoft Partner Network. In 2011, GreenButton was declared as Microsoft Corp’s Windows Azure ISV Partner of the Year. They also won the 2011 New Zealand Partner of the Year Award from Microsoft New Zealand. GreenButton also won the Cyber Gold Award for Technology, during the 2012 Wellington Gold awards, for its platform for applications transitioning to the cloud. GreenButton was also among the finalists for the New Zealand Hi-Tech awards 2012 in two categories: Microsoft Hi-Tech Emerging Company Award and the Duncan Cotterill Innovative Hi-Tech Software Product Award.

GreenButton won BizSpark Partner of the Year and Software Exporter of the Year awards from MS New Zealand in 2011. Also, Dave Fellows of GreenButton won the Solutions Architect of the Year award that year.

Products

As of 2012, GreenButton enabled software platforms include:

• Blender - A open-source 3-D content creation suite, used by various animation studios to create 3-D art and animations. The company claims that the software speeds up image rendering by as much as 800%.
• Brazil - Software application used for getting high quality and artist-friendly workflow in the Autodesk 3ds Max.
• Geneious - Bioinformatics software platform created by the GreenButton, which can be used for the searching, organizing, and analysing genomic and protein information.
• LuxRender - Free rendering software which specializes in stimulating the flow of light according to physical equations to produce realistic images of photographic quality.
• Yafaray - Open-source ray-tracing engine used by 3-D artists and architects who need a renderer that can turn their art into lifelike images.
• Deep Exploration - Used to create complex, photorealistic models and designs for distribution into the Visual Enterprise.
• GreenButton inCus - Search optimization solution for content management, based on MAVIS.
• RenderMan On Demand - a new cloud based rendering service for Pixar’s RenderMan.
• Numerix – providers of cross-asset analytics for derivatives valuations and risk management.

Partnerships

In addition to the partnership announced with the GNS Science / Stillwater Group, in 2012 GreenButton also entered into a partner ship with Numerix, an American company that develops software for risk analysis of financial derivatives. The main aim of the tie up was to provide Numerix clients with a hassle-free, secure, and on-demand access to the cloud computing resources.

GreenButton recently partnered with the Pixar Animation Studios and the Microsoft's cloud computing platform Windows Azure, to launch a new cloud rendering service called "RenderMan On Demand". The service enhances the RenderMan application programming interface for optimal performance.

Alliance with Microsoft Azure

In 2011, GreenButton entered into an alliance agreement with Windows Azure. According to GreenButton, the deal formalizes the partnership between it and MS Azure, which will see GreenButton’s cloud enabling technology promoted worldwide through MS Azure. Talking about the deal, the Azure General Manager Doug Hauger claimed that the alliance between MS Azure and GreenButton is an example of the "democratization of IT".

Geographic spread

GreenButton focused on the spread of its business outside New Zealand after 2010. In 2011, they opened two offices in the United States. The office at Palo Alto, California functions as the US headquarters of the company. The second office, located in Seattle, functions as a sales offices. GreenButton claims to have end user customers in a total of 77 countries.