About me
Analyst at Longworth Venture Partners
Prior Lives
• Infrastructure software analyst at The 451 Group
• Software engineer, Morgan Stanley
Everything old is new again…
… or is it?
Cloud computing buzz
4500% in
18 Job postings mentioning “EC2”
months
Amazon.com vs AWS network bandwidth over time
So what is cloud computing?
And why the buzz?
Source: UC Davis networking documentation from 1998
Photo credit Gerard Casey, Rob Graham, Paul Loebig
credit:
Cloud computing on- is a model for enabling convenient,
demand shared pool
network access to a of configurable
computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be
rapidly provisioned and released with
minimal management effort or service provider
interaction.
-- NIST Cloud Computing Project
A (very) brief taxonomy
• Software as a Service
– $21bn by 2012 (20% CAGR)
• Platform as a Service
– $9bn by 2012 (160% CAGR)
• Infrastructure as a Service
– $4bn by 2012 (60% CAGR)
Sources:
Sources AMR, Gartner, IDC, William Blair & Co.
Killer apps for the cloud (so far…)
• Web applications
• Batch jobs
– Scientific computing
– Rich media processing
• Test+dev and one-off
projects
• Getting out of the business
of IT
Credit: Geek and Poke
So why should startups
be excited?
Cloud as new business enabler
• Low user friction
• Internet standard abstractions
• Easy client access
• Potential cost savings (?)
What’s so cool this time?
Economies of scale
+ Low user friction
+ Ease of integration
Opening up the SMB IT opportunity?
What’s so cool this time?
Openness &
network effects
Giant market
opportunity
No single winner
Summary
• Cloud computing is a tectonic shift and it’s real
• There are many issues yet to be worked out
• The cloud enables new apps and new business
models
• The cloud’s inherent openness encourages
innovation
• The cloud’s unique characteristics might open up the
SMB market
