Building a tech community in the cloud...

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Comment by Francis A. Covington on May 26, 2010 at 8:33am

Daniel:
Amazon and Google are good companies, and by no means am I slamming them. I did mis-speak however. Perhaps a better statement would have been limited flexibility. That being said,..What I mean is that they have a fixed business model in packaging their offering that is designed to encourage more usage. Their profit structure is based on their ability to get you to use more. The differtiator is that we are vendor agnostic, and as a result we win new customers by bringing many players to the table, and customizing solutions focused on the particular customers business challange, and opposed to their technical challenge. By using this model, we give our customers a better value for the dollars they spend.

Comment by Daniel Leuck on May 26, 2010 at 4:42am

Francis A. Covington: As for Amazon and Google... they are selling "solutions in a box". There is no flexibility.

Aloha Francis. Can you clarify what you mean by this? We use Amazon EC2 and Google GAE for multiple applications and find them to be cost effective, flexible and reliable.

Comment by Francis A. Covington on May 26, 2010 at 4:27am

I absolutely agree with your perspective. I would love to see Hawaii become a leader in cloud solutions. At one point when I was selling disaster recovery solutions, I had every major data center in Hawaii as a client. In fact I pushed our company to build a satellite data center in Hawaii. The biggest challenge was cost. In the current market conditions, I can get raised floor space in Los Angeles or Silicon Valley for less than 85 cents a foot. I am told (and have not confirmed) that similar space in Hawaii is more than 2 dollars a square foot. Then when you add the cost of bringing in Diesel and Chillers, the cost gets staggering to develop a competitive infrastructure.

As for Amazon and Google... they are selling "solutions in a box". There is no flexibility. I recently wrote a business plan for my company to bring out a similar solution (as a competitive product). The plan was rejected because my company at its core believes that the answer to cloud computing is customized solutions fitting a variety of services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.), that adresses our clients business needs. I agree with the strategy, but it would have been nice to have had a competitive product :).

Comment by Ian Gilyeat on May 25, 2010 at 7:26pm

Hi Francis - appreciate the commentary. Indeed - quite helpful although I was less pointed at the SaaS players selling into the islands as much as questioning why Hawaii based companies don't use cloud solutions in order to sell to the mainland. One of the obvious benefits of the cloud is that you can access it from anywhere. As a result if I'm a technology company based in Hawaii I can expand my market much easier by developing in the cloud instead of limiting my opportunities to Hawaii only businesses.

Based on Daniel's comment it may be that Amazon with their EC2 have more of a foothold in the local tech community than does Salesforce, Microsoft or others.

Comment by Francis A. Covington on May 25, 2010 at 11:43am

Good Afternoon Ian:
In my humble opinion ;)... part of the challenge with the Pacific Rim is that there is still a genuine distrust of mainlanders. And, Let's face it, almost all of the cloud providers (including my own company), do not have a large presence in Hawaii. I also live on the mainland, and have sold to Hawaii for more than 16 years now. However, even though I have worked with every major data center and CIO, I still get put through the wringer on every opportunity. In fact the last major deal I closed at Kaiser, put me in Hawaii every three weeks for almost four months.

Another reason is the myths around cloud computing... even in the industry. I sat in a seminar this morning, while two industry analyst stated that they could not see HIPAA compliance in the cloud. After about ten minutes of that discussion I finally interupted, and told them that my company provides cloud services to approximately 20 plus healthcare companies, and they all state that they are now MORE secure in meeting the security requirement of HIPAA.

Also, if you read the story in the Star News about the Hawaii DOE ,and Googles' lack of sensitivity toward the needs of Hawaii, it just fules the fire on NOT doing business with companies that don't have a significant presence in the area.

At the end of the day Cloud Computing is the absolute best answer for immediate cost reduction, versatility, and increased productivity (NOT A COMMERCIAL). The Pacific Rim will ultimately get there, as the need to be more globally competitive requires unique solutions. I recently read a report by one of the industry analyst that stated that the medium sized companies are going to be leading the charge to cloud computing. The main reason is that they have the resources to maintain flexibility in meeting their customers needs. To that end, I spoke to a few folk about setting up a cloud computing seminar, and I may still have a breakfast or something similar in the third quarter. If I do, I will have some great white papers, and materials available to distribute.

Hope that I was able to provide some insight...

Comment by Daniel Leuck on May 21, 2010 at 9:10pm

Hi Ian - There are a number of companies in Hawaii who have built SaaS and Web 2.0 apps on cloud platforms such as Amazon (EC2) and Google (GAE) - Sprout, Chi.mp, Unfuddle, Ooi, Ascribe, etc. I'm not aware of any local companies building on top of Salesforce (although they may exist.) I agree they have a very interesting platform.

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