Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Knipple, CTO of EasyStreet (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the SaaS and PaaS market. What is the positioning? Who are the competitors? What are the dynamics of that business?

Steve Knipple: Once you’re in the SaaS and the e-commerce space, then you’re competing against the hyperscalers such as Amazon, Azure, Google, and traditional managed services providers. In that space, you’re actually talking to people who are writing the code. Where we win and where we differentiate ourselves in that SaaS and e-commerce market is we have developers on staff as well. It’s developers talking to developers. We get an edge because these are people who want a much more transparent look into their cloud infrastructure versus what they’re able to get from a hyperscaler. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Knipple, CTO of EasyStreet (Part 2)

Steve Knipple: We take a highly consultative approach with those people and we do systems engineering with them, and we help them transition into a cloud platform. Those are the two things. We have the enterprise market. We are the augmentation of an internal IT department providing compute capacity and management services. In SaaS play, we are talking directly to developers.

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to double-click down on each of those segments to understand the dynamics. The enterprise segment obviously has a lot of vendors in that category. What is it that makes you different? Whom do you compete with and how do you win?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Knipple, CTO of EasyStreet (Part 1)

Steve Knipple lays out a clear picture of the managed cloud infrastructure-as-a-service space, including a great pointer to open problems that customers are asking for solutions to. Cloud entrepreneurs, take note.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as EasyStreet.

Steve Knipple: I’m the Chief Technology Officer of EasyStreet Corporation based out of Beaverton, Oregon. We’re a company in transition right now. We have been in business for about 20 years and we have followed the technological trends and improved >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The truth is we have seen a lot of these people coming out and building companies. I think that trend is going to accelerate.

Sebastian Stadil: That is my story as well. Before founding Scalr, I worked at a company where I was manually managing infrastructure for them. The experience that I got from that allowed me to have the inside expertise of managing infrastructure.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let me just comment on it before you go on. I think the framework that you’re setting is interesting because we have seen this in action especially over the last decade where there were a lot of functions that were getting outsourced to the various outsourcing providers and that are still being outsourced, but to SaaS vendors. That’s the evolution that I think synthesizes what you’ve said so far. It’s also interesting that it ties in to your own story. You took a function that is a do-it-yourself function where people were trying to cobble together internally and built a solution to it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr (Part 5)

Sebastian Stadil: An example would be a healthcare provider that makes a survey of all the cloud management platforms available in the market and determines that none meets all of its requirements. They start using cloud and they build their own tooling. After a while, they find that the processes that they’re bringing to the cloud are not fit for it. Then they start to revise their processes and become a bit more standardized. They start using the best practices. That’s when they become good candidates to start using the cloud management platform.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr (Part 4)

Sebastian Stadil: A developer may choose to use Scalr and then they use Scalr for agility purposes. As adoption grows inside of the organization and their developers start using it as well, that’s when IT starts to use Scalr as a tool to enforce policies. Scalr is this platform that allows for the management of cloud resources. Developers use it to manage their cloud resources and IT uses this as a tool to enforce security policies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on this management stack for infrastructure-as-a-service, what are some of the open problems that you still see out there?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ajit Gupta, CEO of Aryaka Networks (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: There’s been a bit of progress in the startup ecosystem in India. Its growth is slower than I thought. I started covering that ecosystem in an online blog back in 2005. I thought it would move a lot faster. It depends on if you look at the glass being half-full or half-empty. I tend to be an optimist. We are entrepreneurs. We can’t afford not to be optimist.

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