The Italian hosting company Aruba - unlisted with a ?100 million turnover - won the auction and the right to sell the domains ending in .cloud. They identify all the solutions based on cloud technology, from single systems to entire service structures. Worth mentioning services are SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

International press compared the event to "David's victory against Goliath" and it is not hard to understand why. The private auction was held a couple of weeks ago and - surprisingly - none of the two "giants" Amazon and Google, which both applied for the extension, won it. The event was a result of the decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to create scores of new gTLD domain name extensions. Since it was a private auction, the exact price is not known. Still, considering that Amazon just paid .buy $4.6 million, experts assume that Aruba payed around $10 million.

CEO Stefano Cecconi shared with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera his great satisfaction in few words: "We are very proud to have this globally important gTLD and to be the new Icann accredited domain registrar for .cloud, especially because we're a new player in the market. Cloud is the only new gTLD name extension that Aruba applied for and registrations will be operative from 2015".

Aruba is based in Arezzo and has been active in the Italian market for over 20 years. It also stands as a leader Eastern European markets for the number of hosted websites and registered domain names. In addition, the company provides solutions of dedicated servers, housing colocation, managed services and has a strong experience in data center management.

Aruba counts over 2 million customers and partners, making the group one of the top five hosting companies in Europe.

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