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Cirrus Computing & EnterpriseLibre

I founded and ran Cirrus Computing from 2007 to 2016. We developed the world's first all FOSS complete enterprise in the cloud - network, email, office suite, document management, and dozens of other best in class open source applications, all available anywhere over the Internet on virtual Ubuntu desktops.

The coolest visible feature was the virtual desktop accessible from any computer anywhere that performed as though it was installed locally. However, the two most remarkable system features were single-click automation of organization creation and user creation:

  • Enterprise Recursion. Each new enterprise organization came with a System Manager that enabled you to create any number of other new organizations, given only a domain name, with a single click in less than an hour processing time. Each new organization started with one virtual desktop, which in turn included a System Manager from which you could create any number of other organizations, and so on. A single virtual enterprise provided, effectively, a single click ISP in a box. It was almost self aware ;-)
  • Enterprise Automation. Each new organization's first desktop also included an Enterprise Manager which could create new users for the organization with a single click in less than 15 minutes processing time. Each user would be emailed their login details to their new virtual desktop, with their new email at the domain all set up, and access to all of their organization's multi-user applications such as document management ready to go with single-sign-on. Therefore, you could set up a brand new cloud ready enterprise with much more capability than the very best local IT infrastructure in just minutes.

EnterpriseLibre was also the most secure cloud enterprise solution available, since the encrypted virtual desktop provided the only point of access, and because of the "single-tenant" architecture where each organization had a completely dedicated set of their own software, an architecture only economically possible at scale with FOSS, and with a server performance overhead of less than 5% due to the containerization architecture.

While EnterpriseLibre provided a much better solution than anything else available (and still the case), the competition of free Google apps on one side, and very inexpensive Microsoft 365 with large organization assurance on the other, eventually made it economically infeasible for Cirrus Computing to support. All the documentation and code have been open sourced and are available to anyone that wishes to pick it up. Who knows, perhaps some day its time will come again.

More information can be found at the following:

  • Five minute video of EnterpriseLibre key functionality.
  • System description - ODF, PDF.