Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Indu Kodukula, Executive VP of Products and CTO, SunGard Availability Services (Part 7)

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? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Indu Kodukula, Executive VP of Products and CTO, SunGard Availability Services (Part 6)

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, right?

SM: I am talking about the noncloud vendor clients. From a SunGard perspective, I understand that some of these cloud vendors are going to become your customers and some of them already are.

IK: Yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Indu Kodukula, Executive VP of Products and CTO, SunGard Availability Services (Part 5)

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 the software availability that is virtualized is there. I don’t think that is necessarily the concern. I think the concern becomes how do you take that workload – let’s say you take SharePoint and you run that on VMware – how do you find a service provider who is going to be able to do that for you? How are you going to be able to do that and remain comfortable, as enterprise IT, that you’re not going to sacrifice on availability or security?  I think there is, from a public cloud perspective, there is Amazon, and there is everybody else. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Indu Kodukula, Executive VP of Products and CTO, SunGard Availability Services (Part 4)

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 your data centers? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Indu Kodukula, Executive VP of Products and CTO, SunGard Availability Services (Part 3)

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 a shared inventory that matches the customer infrastructure. In the event of any sort of service interruption, we are in a position to recover, or we are in a position to help our clients recover their applications on the same inventory or the same infrastructure on which they run their applications. Now, as we added production services to the mix, it became very clear to us that a lot of our customers were starting to look at disaster recovery in a new light. It was much less about something bad happening at one point or something catastrophic happening at one point. It was much more about, How did they think of recovery as part of an availability spectrum where for tier one applications, they wanted a down time of 15 minutes. >>>

Qihoo: A Chinese Internet Powerhouse

Thomson Reuters data shows that 21 Chinese companies with VC backing raised $2.2 billion last year when they went public in the United States. From 2000 to June 2010, mainland Chinese companies raised $188 billion in 495 deals on leading global stock exchanges, including the NYSE, Nasdaq, LSE, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. During the same period, worldwide there were 1,114 deals raising $366 billion. Ernst & Young estmates that China will lead the IPO market in the coming years. Beijing-based Internet player Qihoo 360 Technology, is one recent entrant to the NYSE who raised $200 million as part of their IPO funding round. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jim Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer, Dell (Part 9)

Sramana Mitra: To finish up, we will connect the dots and end with talking about the entire productivity suite inside enterprises. By this I mean the email–collaboration–Office suite. It seems as though there is a big change going on there. We started with relatively heavy enterprise applications like Lotus Notes. Even Microsoft Exchange is a relatively heavier footprint system for the productivity suite. Now we are seeing a shift to a lightweight cloud-oriented systems model, and Google with the Google apps portfolio seems to have made a dent there. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Indu Kodukula, Executive VP of Products and CTO, SunGard Availability Services (Part 2)

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 is all impacting you? What are the thoughts inside the company across that spectrum? >>>