Friday, March 30, 2012

The Cloudcast - Eps.35 - Cover your *aaS, Cover your Costs


Guest: Mat Ellis (@matellis) - CEO at Cloudabiity


Topic 1 - Consuming public cloud services is as simple as using a credit card. But how naive or clueless are consumers of Cloud services when it comes to costs?

Topic 2 - Cloudability has been in business for a year and already has over 2000 customers. Your customers obviously like the simplicity/useability of the service and they believe it saves them money. What insight are you seeing about your early customers and their usage of the cloud?

Topic 3 - There are quite a few interesting SaaS-based companies that deliver various forms of Cloud Management services (security, deployment, cost visibility). Given how flexible these services are, is there any reason to believe that we’ll see big, monolithic management services for the cloud (eg. CA, BMC, etc)?

Topic 4 - What’s the interesting technology in your space? Does it have more to do with Cloud APIs, or is more about your back-end tools to be able to analyze, forecast and give cost guidance?

Topic 5 - Public cloud can delivers a lot of flexibility and agility benefits, but sometimes there is a lot of FUD around its actual costs. Cloudability has a lot of expertise in this space. How do you have cost discussions with new customers?

Topic 6 - What type of services do your v2.0 customers ask you for? With companies like AWS beginning to encourage more usage of reserved instances, are you seeing customers ask you to help them do longer-term budgeting or add advanced cost-mamagement services? Reserved Instances Blue

Topic 7 - Cloudability was part of TechStars Cloud and PIE PDX incubation programs. How valuable are programs like that to accelerate and guide new start-ups?