We keep getting asked by prospective clients for an elevator pitch about how ENKI is different than its competitors.   In a meeting with a Fortune 500 company yesterday, I blurted this out.  Our sales advisor was there and wrote it down, so I'm posting it here!

1.         Service Level Agreements:  Many cloud companies' service can vary in performance by up to 10x over a 24 hour period.  ENKI has deployed high performance computing technology to solve the slowdowns that plague many cloud computing services.    All of our contracts are SLA driven and we provide 7 by 24 support with real humans you can talk to.   Our SLAs have meaningful guarantees so you know we're up when you're down.
2.         Analytics:  We monitor everything we do because you can't promise service levels unless you measure them!   ENKI's monitoring tools analyze application performance (including at the database and web server level) to define the optimal configuration for a production application.   We take this knowledge and help companies accurately characterize the most cost-effective model for cloud deployment.
3.         Virtual IT:  Most clients we work with have a technical gap when moving to the cloud, either in skills, knowledge or simply manpower.  We fill it.  We deliver IT as a service, delivered on a pay-as-you-go basis, consisting of virtual private data centers or virtual servers in the cloud, combined with outsourced IT operations services including systems design, setup, operation optimization, security, and incident response - even application definition and coding!  A total solution to your IT needs.

Today I was eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe with my dog at my feet, and a man walked up to me and asked me if I could help him.  He looked sort of like a slightly disheveled yet surprisingly well-dressed homeless person, so I was curious what he wanted and asked him how I could help.  He seemed confused and asked me what street he was on and where some other streets in the area were.  I told him and asked him what he was looking for, and he said "my car - I lost track of it two days ago!"  He then went on to say that he had Multiple Sclerosis and it made him forgetful, but that he could trust me with helping him since I looked trustworthy - because I had "a beard and a dog."

I was surprised and amused to hear him say this, but it made me think:  what are the clues that we use to decide if we're going to trust someone?  And more importantly for you and me, how will you decide if you trust us at ENKI to serve your business?

For me, I most often trust someone based on my intuition, and then secondary characteristics like their track record, their affiliations, their experience, knowing who trusts them, or simply knowing them in some way perhaps because we went to school together or worked together.  

Since ENKI provides not just cloud computing but also operations services that effectively take the place of all or part of an IT department, it is critical that we be trustworthy, and that prospective customers trust us.   Our business was founded on providing trust as the fundamental product, and our Enki Way defines how we go about it.   But customers who come to us still need to know more than our intentions in order to trust us.   Typical ways I see them trying to figure this out is asking us: 

• How long we've been in business providing cloud (4 years: longer than any other cloud computing company.)
• Getting references by referrals (our #1 source of new customers is referrals!)
• Checking the company principals - such as me - out through social networks, bios, associations, etc.  (For example, we get quite a bit of business from Cornell Alumni who are entrepreneurs and businesspeople that I meet through my Cornell connections.)  Our founders' experience as the CIO of NetSuite has definitely brought trust to us as having a team that knows about reliable computing.
• Looking at the terms of the relationship that we offer, such as our 10x downtime guarantee, our rapid turnaround service SLAs, and our satisfaction guarantee - all of which show that we have skin in your game.
• How many customers/employees/locations we have.
• What technologies and vendors we use, presumably to gauge our judgment.
• and more...

These are all passive methods, in the sense that people use them without interacting with us.  No matter what answer we give, this makes ENKI look a lot like other cloud providers (aside from the technical and service differences of our offering.)   In some ways, they are like looking to see if we have a beard and a dog!  Personally speaking, there are plenty of guys with beards and dogs that I'd find difficult to trust.

Instead, what we have found is that our best tool to convince people to trust us is... us.   The majority of our customers' executives have met our founders at some point, even if they're based in other countries.  We've even made early and late trips to the airport to meet customers on their layovers.  And failing a personal meeting, a phone call with our extraordinarily gifted sales team or with one of the founders can tell you a lot about us.  Each of our founders and partners is always happy to talk to propects about ourselves and of course, your challenges in securing cost-effective enterprise-grade computing for your business.

So if you find what we offer interesting, I invite you to call us.  I personally will be delighted to speak with you.   Even if you aren't impressed by beards or dogs!

By the way, I never found out the particulars of why that man was looking for his car.  It was a strange story - strange enough that I will keep looking for him every time I go downtown.

I recently read an interesting article about how a number of cloud providers' services were studied by researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and found to have significant performance problems.   This isn't too surprising: virtualizing a highly variable mix of loads on shared infrastructure is a hard problem.   Despite this, cloud computing is still a major growth industry, with Garner predicting that it will grow from $46Bn last year to $150Bn.  While these numbers are debatable (especially since everyone has a different idea of what Cloud is and I suspect Gartner used the broadest one), they do indicate a growing market.

However within this market, there is definitely room for a variety of approaches to meet different needs for cost and performance.  The largest cloud vendors, starting with Amazon, use commodity hardware and achieve surprisingly good results with it, but still limited by the realities of commodity hardware and other optimizations they have made to deliver service at the lowest possible price.  As a result, customers who are attempting to use these services outside their design capabilities are in for a big surprise, as these Australian researches discovered.   One discovery they made was that "response times on the services also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed."  At a recent Cloud Camp, I saw the resulting frustration, often as a result of customers having to overprovision to meet their performance goals, and as a result, being disappointed that cloud deployment costs exceeded what they expected.  The researchers also brought up the lack of measurement and monitoring tools that allow customers to verify their performance in a production environment, something that we at ENKI consider to be absolutely essential to any business use of the internet.

ENKI was founded not on providing the best price, but rather the best value to its customers, which we measure as TCO (Total Cost of Operations), to which performance is a contributing factor.  To this end, over the years we've added enterprise grade monitoring and have been improving the performance of our cloud to match our customers' expectations.  Recently we've developed a higher-end cloud computing product that has the same performance as a purpose-built datacenter would have, called PrimaCloud .  I'll be writing more about PrimaCloud in a future article.

Last week witnessed some interesting pronouncements at the Structure09 conference, in which the industry's leading lights had the chance to boast about their accomplishments.  One that caught my eye was that LinkedIn "only" uses 350 servers.

I'm shocked to hear that a text-based service, even with millions of users, uses 350 servers, and that someone would think that was a relatively small number.   Working here at ENKI with customers who do similar things to LinkedIn, I'd always assumed it would be 20-30 servers, at most.   I can't help but think that LinkedIn isn't taking advantage of the latest automated virtualization management technologies, or there is some sort of inefficiency in their system.  I'd love 350 servers of their business, but I think I'd be embarrassed to charge them for all those servers.
As an example, I recently participated in planning the conversion of a major email management site to our cloud.  They have about 40 servers running a windows-based infrastructure.  I believe, as do they, that their software implementation is relatively efficient. In our cloud, after removing clustering and failover pairs - no longer necessary due to automated hardware failure recovery that brings the app back online within the same amount of time as a cluster can fail over - they only needed 20.  When we added automated workload management, which scales actual server use to demand, they averaged 4 servers over the course of a day (which is what they actually pay for.)   That big reduction came because their demand was highly variable, so their servers had averaged 5% utilization over the course of the day.  (See graphic at end of this blog entry.)

Overall, they saw a 10x reduction in the number of servers needed to run their site.  That's a cost savings for sure, but also 10x less greenhouse gases, something to be proud of.

Applying a similar method to LinkedIn, they should be at around 35 servers, using technology similar to what we use (whether in their datacenter or ours.)  What am I missing here?