Cloud Web Services – Graduate Circle

Complex Beast! Hairball! These are buzzwords about implementing billing in the cloud, and with all right say Aria Systems, a ‘Under the Radar’ graduate. Their emphasis is on giving the tools for analysing what their customers are doing and why.

Marketo is a year-old company that helps companies with the B2B buy cycle. How do buyers find you, research you and close with you. One year later they have 180 customers including Cisco. Their core message: Marketing and sales need to get aligned in the new business environment, we help companies do that.

Cloud Web Services

After an excellent lunch topped by a superlative choc chip cookie, I just gotta stay awake – this could be the best session of the day.

People use PayPal, Oracle, SAP and so on, eVapt offer a monetization platform for recurring billing – usage, rating, collecting payments etc. for subscriptions but also pay-as-you-go. They have economist.com among their customers, must be a feather in their hat.

Symplified is an interesting cloud security company, they claim they come out of Securant Technologies – a web access management company from 2005.

Usable.com is about security, too. Google say that 50% of users choose the same 1M passwords (that makes it relatively easy to crack those passwords). Usable offer a single sign-on login widget (one password, multiple services, with distributed encryption behind it). They claim to offer  a higher level than Oauth and Facebook Connect (Twitter just pulled their support for Oauth). Revenue comes from enterprise subscriptions and the premium version of the consumer offering. Looks very nice, they are going for financial services which can be tough.

Zuora addresses the developers – how are they going to monetize the services?  They have a commerce platform to allow companies to create their pricing and packaging strategy. They are, according to TechCrunch aiming to be the Salesforce for online billing…or as one of the jury said, next-gen enterprise procurement.

Cloud Management

So if cloud computing is about making IT resources available on-demand to ordinary mortals (non-IT that is) why would one want to have help managing that? The jury valued companies who have focused on cracking one specific problem and not ‘yet another dashboard’. API’s need to be there for customers to solve their own problems.

Sunhil Dhaliwal, Battery Ventures: “Get out there, find a couple of companies who like you, sell and execute” and don’t worry about there being five people doing the same thing.

Cloudkick’s answer went beyond nice UI’s, they showed a drag-and-drop migration of an Amazon machine image from EC2 to Rackspace. Claimed to be a world-first. Peter Cihen, the Amazon WS jury guy called it “amazing stuff”. The challenge will be them keeping up with what the big players each offer on their own. David Powers added “On behalf of the Fortune 500 companies, the amount of innovation being made by small players on a tiny budget is amazing”.

EnStratus puts enterprise apps into the public cloud. claiming ‘five nine’s’ SLA’s and high encryption. Smaller clients pay around $1K per month, larger $30K. Their CTO, George Reese just published a cloud book with O’Reilly.

Tapinsystems could have been yet another “we help you manage” presentation – one of the differentiators (for me) is their emphasis on starting where the enterprise customer ‘is at’ in their processes (rather than start from the Cloud). Makes a lot of sense.

Cloud Platforms

Abiquo is a ten-man company out of Barcelona that offers a platform for managing virtual datacenters.

Eucalyptus allows IT organisations to build and run private and hybrid clouds (moving between Amazon, Google App Engine and Private). “Own the base – rent the spike”. A polished presentation, pushing the brand as the open-source reference implementation for cloud. And not without grounds, take a look at this link for the next release of Ubuntu in October…. named Karmic Koala (do I smell Eucalyptus?)

Question: So what’s the Eucalyptus business model?
Answer: Going for proprietary products based on the open-source with the ‘premium adds’ of e.g, high scalability.

Zimory is a Deutsche Telecom spin-off and Behrend Freese, Zimory’s CEO was the DT Labs innovation cell manager..
This is again about managing a hybrid cloud environment, allowing organisations to take peak or  ‘spill-over’ into a public cloud.
Enterprise customers include Credit Suisse, Deutsche Post and T-Systems.

The jury wanted to see differentiators in the pitches (unique selling points).

Cloud: The Buyer’s Wish List

What are technology ‘Cloud’ buyers are hunting for? What cloud technologies have they adopted? How can companies get on their wish list?

• Mark Bagley, British Telecom. Mark is a part of a team of 4 innovation scouts looking for what to use internally and take to market.
• David Powers, Eli Lilly
• Steve Heck, Getty Images

Mark Bagley: BT run internal clouds incl. a voice cloud, bought Ribbit (cloud voice). Still wondering on whether to get into cloud a la Amazon web services.Use Echosign (e-signatures) and have stepwise integrated with them to simplify interwork (learning curve).

Question: How does the aspect of compliance and standards affect BT?
Mark: We’re highly regulated in the UK, especially on voice and broadband (‘broadband for everyone’) in the UK

Steve: Looking for guarantees for the basket that I put my eggs in.
Strategy on how I get my data back if a vendor goes out…

Dave: We’re not into taking 5000 servers and dropping it into a public cloud tomorrow, but taking specific use cases at the same time that we are building internal clouds. So we can approach the public cloud stepwise as a natural part of lifecycle management.

The recent McKinsey report on the cloud suggested that ‘Cloud’ can ending up costing you – what do the panel say?

Steve: It’s more about managing demand than just managing cost (c.f a rental car). I don’t see ‘Cloud’ as a savior for my budget!

Mark: Budgeting for cloud means you have to be rigorous and it’s rare that we’re spot onto our capacity predictions. So there is no magic bullet here  for cost saving. It’s like being in continual Beta, and even though we have a large IT department they don’t sit around idle, we use partners to cope with various activities.
.The cloud can be sometimes seen as less secure … but we have things that go down internally, too”"

Steve: It’s about freeing one’s own resources to create new revenue (outsourcing)

Mark “We’re looking for technologies to sew our environments together”

Dave: “I want to move terabytes of data in real time”

A Day in the Cloud …

First post from Dealmaker Media’s “Under the Radar” event dedicated to startups in the cloud computing area. This is an area that I believe will have a BIG impact on the telecommunications industry, amongst others. So this deserves its own category, because I’m planning a lot of keythumping today …