Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why didn’t you introduce your company as a cloud-based testing company instead of all this digitization mumbo jumbo?

Ravi Reddy: Good question. We have four different solutions. Two of those are IT, one of those is cloud tester, and the other is called DevOps Express. Those are two solutions that are cloud-based. One is for integration automation. The other one is for testing automation. For the two business solutions, one is supply chain digitalization. The other solution is marketing digitalization. 

Sramana Mitra: I understand cloud testing as a service, integration as a service, and DevOps. We get into the realm of not understanding what you mean by supply chain digitalization and marketing digitalization. Those are complex business functions in themselves. I’d like to understand in each case what is the value that you bring to the table.

You can take any example from your customer base. Let’s do a use case on your supply chain digitization and one case in marketing digitization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 1)

We’ve discussed the vertical cloud trend in previous interviews. This discussion highlights the same trend, but from an entirely different point of view.

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

Ravi Reddy: Sunera Technologies is uniquely positioned in the way that we are helping organisations in digitalization of information technology and digitalization of business. A large number of our solutions and platforms are built on cloud for one to automate, predict IT applications and IT systems such that organisations can drive more productivity from their investments in IT and invest more in creating new business models that are evolving through digitalisation. That’s the core of Sunera.

Sramana Mitra: You need to walk us through some customer use cases. Tell us what kinds of customers you work with and walk us through how you add value to that process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pete Manca, CEO of Egenera (Part 1)

While Amazon dominates the public cloud platform market with AWS, and Microsoft is a distant second, emerging trends show that resellers and application developers are seeing alternatives. Read on for more…

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

Pete Manca: I’m the CEO at Egenera. Egenera is a 15-year-old software company and I have been with the company since the very beginning. We started off mainly in the infrastructure software space selling both the hardware and software solutions that were targeted towards the enterprise market. We did that for the first 10 years of the company’s existence.

About three years ago, we saw the trend of the cloud. We acquired a company in Ireland that specializes in cloud management. We transitioned the company from a traditional enterprise perpetual license software company to a cloud management company that is more of a subscription-based cloud-based company. Today, that’s our main focus—selling, what we call, wholesale cloud. We’re mainly selling for the reseller channel at a wholesale level and providing an easy way to introduce cloud to their customers.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? What specifically are you selling? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You gave an overview. If you were to go out and start a company today, have you heard any customer point out a specific problem that needs to be solved but there is no vendor out there that’s addressing this problem?

Jerry Melnick: We are going to rely on cloud services just like the way we rely on our computer systems today. They are at a level of maturity and accessibility that is not exactly at a level that data centers are today. The opportunity, at least in the space that we live in, is how do I build on or harden that cloud? How do I make that cloud capable of supporting the kinds of service and service levels required for the applications that are most important? Clearly, if cloud can do that, I get the advantage of not just the cloud flexibility and utility and the cost savings, but I also get high value out of its foundational security and availability. What kinds of technologies do we need to provide those high-value services? How do I make my cloud do more? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the industry in your space and the adjacent spaces, where do you see open problems that new entrepreneurs could be working on?

Jerry Melnick: The real movement today is clearly around service-based versus product-based offerings. When I say that, I’m referring specifically to cloud service. Utility computing is finally being realized in the cloud space. Probably the applications that we make highly available are the laggards in the industry in terms of moving into the cloud in providing services, mainly because of the conservative nature. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on your industry. Help me understand the before and after. I understand you said they’re either on-premise or on the cloud, and they’re not on the cloud with industry-specific work flows. Let’s double-click down on that concept. What kinds of systems were they using? What kind of systems are you replacing? What’s happening in each of these industries?

David Schmaier: Let’s take Sky Italia. Sky Italia is a pay TV provider serving 5 million households in Italy. When you go to Europe and you turn on the TV, you see Sky channels. It’s part of that parent company. Sky was previously using Siebel Communications with industry-specific on-premise CRM.

Sramana Mitra: Isn’t that where you were before? Didn’t you work at Siebel before?
>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s actually double-click a little bit into the core use cases that your company enables. Pick whatever client that you want to double-click down into. Walk us through the value proposition and the problem you are solving.

Simon Anderson: Our core platform product is our website hosting platform where a customer can sign up for a very low monthly fee. They basically get a work bench that they can program. They can set up a personal blog. Typically, we’re a very big WordPress host. We’re one of the biggest in the world in terms of the number of installs. We also do other platforms like Joomla. Our core use case is we have a very large user base who use us for blogging and developing their own small business website or their own hobby website. Examples of customers are long tail bloggers. They choose to use a platform like DreamHost as distinct from the free platform because they just get a lot of ability to customize. They can run any plug-in they want, provided it doesn’t present a security issue. They get Shell access to our shared hosting environment so that they can work at the command line if they wish. There’s a great amount of flexibility, which is appealing to that type of customer who is very aspirational to learn more. It spans all the way through to customers like Pink Floyd. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How has your revenue ramped from the 2007 time frame to 2015? Where are you now?

Chris Grandi: We’re growing over 50% per year. In year one, we started our revenue with less than a million dollars. You grow a 100% when your revenue is smaller. Our revenue is significantly bigger now but we’re still growing at more than 50%.  I actually don’t think that we can grow this company at greater than 50% because of the service levels that we have to provide. I will be very pleased if we continue to grow at 50%.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still doing it as a self-financed business? >>>