Sramana Mitra: And how many of these kinds of managed services providers are out there? Alex Osipov: In the U.S. I think there are 56,000. SM: Fifty-six thousand. Wow. AO: Imagine how many small and medium businesses there are all over the world. Most of them aren’t doing their own IT.
Sramana Mitra: In terms of security requirements? Alex Osipov: In terms of security requirements, certainly. SM: So, you’re saying the banking and legal sectors, in particular, where they’re running into bottlenecks is in security? AO: Yes. Mike, you’re the expert on security in the cloud; would you like to chime in here?
Sramana Mitra: If you take that line of thought, your competitors are the platform-as-a-service category, right, Force.com and so forth? Alex Osipov: I actually don’t think of them as competitors. I don’t think we’re even in the same space, to tell you the truth. SM: When you look at the value proposition of the platform-as-a-service
SM: I understand the motivation. I’m asking more for a state of the union in that market. Since you’re an insider in that marketplace, it sounds like one of your strategies is to sell through these telecom providers. DG: Yes. It’s not our only strategy, but we believe it’s a great opportunity for the reasons
SM: Last question, when you look around, what are some of the interesting entrepreneurial opportunities that are opening up because of the wide adoption of platform-as-a-service as it unfolds? PR: If you’re an entrepreneur today, your startup cost is incrementally low. If you have a good idea, to execute on an idea, you can leverage
SM: Let me get another piece of clarification here. So, Microsoft is playing this game both at an isolated platform-as-a-service level as well as an integrated platform-as-a-service plus infrastructure-as-a-service, is that correct? PR: That’s correct. SM: Whereas Amazon is just playing infrastructure-as-a-service, Rackspace is playing the infrastructure-as-a-service game, Microsoft Azure, I presume, can be lowered
SM: Yes. Your point is well taken that there are definitely some gaps in Google’s offering in Google Apps, but there is also a substantial amount of business going to Google, from what I gather, because of the incredible cost structure that they have created. PR: It’s free, yes, it is free … for the
SM: From what I’m seeing, the CRM and related systems, for instance, is one of the areas where an enterprise buys largely public cloud solutions. Of course, there are other big silos which people are procuring largely from public cloud solutions, talent management and various other management areas, and then there’s a long-tail application development