A start-up that used the vague name IT Structures while it was in stealth mode so its purposes couldn’t be divined broke cover Monday as CloudShare and claimed to be the first business-oriented cloud computing company.
The little rascal comes to market with some chi-chi customers that are reportedly pushing it further into the cloud than it intended to go.
Its idea was to use the cloud to demo its software, have potential customers try it “hands-on” and then, if they went for it, have the widgetry installed on their premises.
But it’s not working out that way. They like it just fine on CloudShare’s hybrid cloud and are content – if not insistent – about leaving it that way, according marketing VP Kevin Epstein.
Customers, which include VMware, Cisco, SAP, Websense and Alcatel-Lucent, use the software to train up their sales engineers on their own software or appliances as well as demo their software to the ultimate end users who can play with it to their hearts’ content before deciding to deploy or not.
The mini-sites created bear the sellers’ own branding and collateral materials
CloudShare says its customers have delivered over a million VM demo, proof-of-concept and training hours so far, representing six quarters of consecutive double-digit usage growth. It describes them as moving from experimenting with simple hosted QA labs on public clouds to using CloudShare to turn their complex IT environments into cloud-based services.
The start-up reckons its achievement demonstrates the practical, revenue-oriented, immediately useful nature of its SaaS platform. Solution providers and ISVs can deploy multiple, independent, dashboard-controlled copies of their enterprise-class environments in minutes as opposed to the days or weeks such things used to take – not to mention the time and expense of copying gigabytes of data and shipping machines and people around.
Besides a close-to-immediate ROI, the widgetry promises faster sales cycles, faster training and insight into customer behavior. And it gives vendors a way to keep an eye on who resellers are pitching and their hit rate.
The start-up says its functionality includes extensive workflow, hierarchical access and analytic monitoring. The high-speed environment-creation process that lets users create new production-grade replicas in minutes is patented. Its whiteboarding, screen sharing and self-service capabilities let users share their own prototypes and environments.
It describes itself as the next step in the sales cycle after WebEx because of its whiteboard skills. It also calls itself a Salesforce for VMs.
CloudShare won’t identify the public cloud it’s using as part of its hybrid infrastructure but it does have a partnership with Salesforce.com and plug-in that will let Salesforce users launch CloudShare demos on AppExchange. (See http://CloudShare.com/sfplugin.)
Epstein said the company expects to have some kind of relationship with Amazon and Rackspace down the road. It underscores that it doesn’t want to be in the hosting business although it’s maintaining its own data center as a private cloud for customer use.
CloudShare, or its previous incarnation, has been around for almost three years and has gotten a $6 million A round from Gemini Capital and Sequoia Capital. It says it’s not looking for more money right now. It’s got somewhere between 25 and 50 employees, but it’s shy about saying exactly how many. Headquartered Menlo Park, California, its R&D center is in Tel Aviv.
Source:
http://web2.sys-con.com/node/1211772
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