Sramana Mitra: Is that an opportunity that is similar to what Salesforce.com has done in customer relationship management, or are you saying more domain-specific applications inside enterprises or vertical applications and so forth? Indu Kodukula: No, I think it’s across the board, even for horizontal applications. SM: That is happening, though, the horizontal application is happening in droves.
Sramana Mitra: So, let me go back to the question I asked. Are you doing something proactively in terms of offering incentives to entrepreneurs to set up their cloud services on your platform? Indu Kodukula: Absolutely. First of all, you can come and deploy your services on us. If you don’t, we offer you essentially a way
Sramana Mitra: Maybe the one data point that would clarify the segmentation is what is the revenue level range of the 10,000 clients that SunGard services? Indu Kodukula: It is starting at about $2 billion and going down to several hundred million. SM: It is not SME; it is more the mid-size enterprise?
Sramana Mitra: What you are saying is the applications are going to go on to third-party cloud-based application vendors. The infrastructure is going to go to the data center companies and the public cloud vendors who deliver infrastructure as a service. Indu Kodukula: And in many cases, the application vendors will actually run on that infrastructure,
Sramana Mitra: Taking the SharePoint example, why doesn’t Microsoft have a public cloud version of SharePoint for this class of customers? Indu Kodukula: I think if you look at the cloud broadly today, you absolutely have a version of SharePoint that runs on hyper-v, which is a Microsoft hypervisor, or you can run it on VMware. I think
Sramana Mitra: That’s very interesting. You sit at a good vantage point to be able to say how these 10,000 customers are using the cloud strategy, using the data center, using SunGard. Can you provide some sort of an overview of what exactly people are doing? What are these small and medium enterprises putting on
Sramana Mitra: What was the origin of your business? You said you have been in the disaster recovery for 30 years. Were you delivering boxes to your clients at that point? Indu Kodukula: We have historically been an infrastructure-heavy business, and our business model has been very simple. On the recovery side, our business model has been
Sramana Mitra: What is the company’s philosophy as far as cloud computing is concerned? To some extent, the entire cloud movement has played in your favor because the data center has become such a big part of business today, especially third-party data centers. Would you give me an overview of your cloud philosophy and how this