Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens to Box and Dropbox? Do they get washed-up by Google and Microsoft providing this for free?

Vineet Jain: I will not pontificate to say what happens to them but I can share the general trend. Two years back with the cloud-only play, whether you were pitching to the SMB or enterprise, you could get away with an average pricing per seat of $25 to $35 per seat. Those days are long gone. Now, when you pitch to the same customer with the same solution, you are dealing with a price point which is going down to $6 to $8 per seat per month. In some large volume cases when you’re dealing with 10,000 seat deployment, it gets down to $3 to $4. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From a user point of view, are you trying to hide that complexity and make it seamless for the user, but the enterprise policy determines whether it’s going to be stored on a public cloud server or a private cloud server. Is that what you’re saying? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 1)

If you are confused about the cloud file storing and sharing space, this interview with Vineet Jain should throw some light on the dynamics of the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Egnyte.

Vineet Jain: I’m the CEO and co-founder of Egnyte – a company that I started in 2008 with three others. We started Egnyte with a very simple idea. We were trying to replace a physical file server with something that was multi-tenanted and hosted without realizing that we were actually building a cloud play. We actually called the product an on-demand file server. Of course, once we realized that the word cloud is hot, we replaced on-demand with cloud. That was the idea from which Egnyte was born. Here we are today with 42,000 enterprise customers. We are around 300 employees headquartered in Mountain View. We were funded by Google, Seagate, and Polaris among others. We have raised $62.5 million so far. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Knipple, CTO of EasyStreet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How does your customer base split up into those categories? What percentage of the customers are the big spenders?

Steve Knipple: I would say that 50% to 60% are these larger accounts. These are people who want very large infrastructure. They have already scaled and they’re looking for that extra touch. Then about 40% to 50% are in the smaller range. Any customer that comes by us almost always grows with us. Many of the customers that are north of $80,000 a month started smaller with us.

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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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