Cloud Superman or Business Superstar?
As we head into VMWorld week, the focus of my attention is going to be on all the cool new cloud technology that will shown off there, and what our competition has come up with. However, I've been talking to a number of prospects for our managed cloud computing services in the last week, and it struck me that none of them asked me anything about all the wonderful technology ENKI deploys into its PrimaCloud service. How can this be: the world is drowning in hype about cloud computing, and our next slate of customer partners don't care about cloud at all? (Of course, they DO care about what the technology can give them!)
At the same time, I was interviewing a potential VP of Bus Dev for ENKI who asked me to characterize our customers. This made me realize that the central question for our prospects is:
Do you want to be a Cloud Superman or a Business Superstar?
Our customers want to be business superstars. Most of them view the necessary evil of operations as something they haven't been able to get away from until they found ENKI, and that if they had their choice, they'd be focused on imagining the best way to grow their business 10x in the next year, not what the infrastructure needs to be to accomplish that, or how much knowledge of cloud computing they have amassed in the process. They know that their total cost of operations includes the consequences of all the mistakes one can make in managing software deployments in cloud or colo infrastructure. Often, they are experienced executives who have already made those mistakes, much like we did at startups and enterprises many years ago, and are not eager to repeat them.
We have a new customer, Krome Photos, who has an amazing outsourced photo-retouching/editing service that you can use to get what you previously needed a professional photographer to give you - but with your own pictures, and at a fraction of the cost. He gave us his entire operations responsibility, and we've expanded his infrastructure to keep up with his ever-accelerating growth. Now, he's preparing to charge for his beta product - almost unheard of in the Web2.0 world. I think of him as a Business Superstar!
To be sure, we get a lot of contacts from people who are worried about a 5-cent difference in CPU-per-hour cost, or whether we use Sun or NetApp storage systems, or whether they might lose some control over their production environment if they can't physically touch the servers or log in to the IPMI interface. Often those people don't become our customers or are impossible for us to provide our exceptional services to, since they aren't asking us to help them with what we do best, which is to take responsibility for their production IT deployments.
For example, we have one customer who thought his business was "too large" for a smaller cloud company like ENKI. But he wanted to try us out anyway to compare us to Amazon. So, he put his database in our cloud and his business logic layer into Amazon. The result is that if there is network congestion or Amazon suffers one of its regular "5pm doldrums", his application goes down. And he points the finger at ENKI. Unfortunately, as much as we'd like to, there is little we can do to save him from this situation because it's an architectural nightmare. He gets to be a Cloud Superman, but his business suffers. And he's not our biggest customer, but our smallest!
So, are you a cloud superman, or a business superstar? Drop me a line with our comment form below!
If you happen to be at VMWorld, come visit us a breakfast seminar we're putting on with one of our vendor-partners, Voltaire, which makes outstanding hardware as well as truly understanding cloud infrastructure. We'll be discussing "Designing Managed Clouds for Growth" on Wednesday September 1 at the Marriot next door to VMWare. Register at www.voltaire.com/vmworld-seminar
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