By Laton McCartney

Speaking before a panel of CIOs, and cloud customers at recent Under the Radar sponsored showcase of cloud computing startups organized by the Dealmaker media, Cloudkick CEO Alex Polvi, answered the two most basic questions about any startup: What is Cloudkick and why would you want to use it?

"Cloudkick is a system to manage cloud servers like those provided by Amazon," Polvi said. "As a user, you talk to Cloudkick, and then we talk to your provider on your behalf.:" A Y Combinator (an incubator) company, Cloudkick has been in operation for only a few months . Since launch, it already has 1200 registered users and 6000 registered servers.

It hopes to attract additional users—for now the service is free—for two overriding reasons, Polvi said. "The first is our unified interface, which makes it easy to work with multiple providers, and the second is our features."

Cloudkick, which is currently made up of two engineers and a designer, revealed the most impressive of those features at the Under the Radar showcase. Using something called Cloudshift which is built into its cloud management control panel, Polvi demonstrated a live migration of an Amazon EC2 machine image (the template for servers on EC2) to Slicehost (part of The Rackspace Cloud family). "This is the first concrete example of cloud interoperability," Polvi said when the migration had been completed.

The showcase judges awarded Cloudkick a "Best in Show" award.

Watch the Cloudkick presentation at the Under the Radar Conference.

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