Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joe Graves, CIO of Stratus (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you say “with support,” what does that mean? All SaaS providers provide support.

Joe Grrave: Well, it’s more than just “how do I do this” or “this isn’t working in this application.” Many of the software as a service providers are, more or less, point solutions at this point. I know you have some platforms with, for example, Salesforce.com, but if you want to create a more complex SaaS environment, you’re going to need integrations and then support those integrations with those customers.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joe Graves, CIO of Stratus (Part 3)

SM: Give me a range of examples of the kinds of managed services your clients are providing.

JG: A good use case that we’ve come across is an independent software vendor (ISV). The company deploys an application to its customers and the application runs on an entire environment that the ISV deploys to its customers. And the customers come back to the ISV and ask it to be their MSP because this company just wants to focus on its software. The ISV has asked if we could take over managing the hardware environment on its behalf. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joe Graves, CIO of Stratus (Part 2)

SM: So, tell me more. Here’s an interesting set of discussions that came out of my conversation with Jared, which [included] looking at the next decade. In the current scenario, his point of view is that there is about 60% of IT work, which is commodity work done in maintenance, backups, all sorts of IT activities that should be and could be automated but are not automated necessarily. Tier 3 is trying to automate all of these things, and they’re forecasting that over this coming decade, this 60% of IT work that is currently in the routine, boring, resource-intensive but automatable functions can be moved to the cloud. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joe Graves, CIO of Stratus (Part 1)

Stratus opened for business when the Internet was still in its infancy and before the cloud even existed. Since then, the company has evolved into an organization that helps clients such as hospitals, utilities, credit card networks, and many others to provide efficient, consistent services to their own customers and clients. To further ensure quality service, Stratus teams up with organizations such as Motorola, Honeywell, and Siemens AG, to name a few.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Joe. If you could, give us some context about Stratus. To begin with, I don’t think the audience would be all that familiar with the company. What’s the business? What’s the scale? What’s the revenue level and number of employees? This is so we have a sense of the scale of the organization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jared Wray, Founder and CTO of Tier 3 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What other forecasts do you have in terms of what you see from where you sit? What other major trends do you see?

Jared Wray: I think hybrid clouds will start to become a standard in the next couple of years. Private clouds are going to look to use a public cloud, but it’s going to be based more on policies. I think CIOs are going to go past their security concerns move into using some of the public clouds for workloads. I also see platform as a service moving beyond what we would normally see as developer or QA testing workloads. I think there are a lot of small and mid-tier businesses that will start putting all of their enterprise-type mission-critical applications in public clouds. Of course, there will be security that goes along with it. But I think that’s going to be a big trend. >>>

Freshdesk Takes Customer Support Social, Raises $1 Million Funding

MENLO PARK, CA – December 1, 2011 – One Million by One Million (1M/1M), a global entrepreneurship incubation program, today announced that global venture capital firm Accel Partners is investing $1 million in Freshdesk, a social customer support startup offering a SaaS solution to small businesses. Freshdesk will use the funding to expand the product team and step up marketing and business development efforts.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jared Wray, Founder and CTO of Tier 3 (Part 3)

SM: What is mid-tier or large environment? What kind of scale are we talking? What size company from a revenue or employee point of view?

JW: I’d say a mid-tier is a $50 million to $250 million environment. So, with a company bringing in revenue of that size, when you think about scale, what we want to enable is an average IT person to do ten times more than what he or she normally does for the company. Instead of managing 10 servers, that person is able to manage 100 servers with our type of technology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jared Wray, Founder and CTO of Tier 3 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I have to say I’m having a little bit of trouble [accepting that]. Infrastructure as a service in a commodity, in one sense. Where is the thought leadership in that? It’s a matter of scale. It’s a matter of execution.

Jared Wray: We see ourselves as a platform as a service, not really an infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure, I agree with you, is commoditized. The market has overly built out the infrastructure. It’s hosting providers who are going to be taking on that. You’re going to have the AWSes of the world doing very commoditized types of things. What we see ourselves doing is pushing the envelope in automation and automation for operations. If you think of normal IT people and what they’re doing on a daily basis, about 60% of their workload is doing what should be automated. Our platform enables that. >>>