The guys at Vmops just changed their name to Cloud.com after buying the namesake domain. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with the Vmops team over the past 9 months as we have built out our ReliaCloud platform. I was pretty surprised about this announcement because I didn’t know that the cloud.com domain name was even for sale! Apparently they bought the domain from the guy that started Meetup. Talk about cashing in on a domain at the right time. With $17MM in new funding the Cloud.com guys certainly had some cash available to spend. I think this is a home run from a marketing standpoint.
I just found out that I’ll be presenting at this year’s Gluecon conference in Boulder, CO. I’m co-presenting a session on IaaS cloud computing with Shannon Williams from Vmops. I’ve never been to Gluecon before and I’m pretty excited about this opportunity. The conference takes place in late May.
Earlier today TDS announced that it had acquired VISI. We are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of TDS Telecom, a Fortune-500 telecommunications provider (NYSE:TDS, TDS.S). It’s all good.
We had basically built the company up as far as we could on our own. Getting to the next level of growth required significantly more capital and far deeper pockets. We also recognized that there was a window of opportunity to really capitalize on our positioning in the regional market. We knew we had to find the right partner to help us grow. And TDS really has been a great partner during the transaction. We need them and they need us.
On a personal note, I am no longer the owner of a company for the first time in almost 9 years. It’s amazing to think back to a day when it was just a couple guys working out of a tiny room. We were able to build an organization that attracted the interest of some of the largest Internet and data center providers in the country. I can’t tell you exactly how that happened because the journey took ten-thousand tiny steps. I never for a single moment thought the business would fail. I thought it would grow much faster than it actually did. Isn’t that wishful thinking shared by most entrepreneurs?
I’m incredibly indebted to the people that helped me reach this point in my career and my life. Two key people are my wife, Susan, and my business partner Mike. And others include many of my co-workers. I appreciate your hard work and support over the years.
I’m relieved that all my years of hard work were ultimately rewarded. I can now focus on the future without the burden of supporting the growth of my business. I’m looking forward to the next chapter in my career.
We’ve finally launched ReliaCloud, our new cloud computing platform at VISI, after six months of hard work and the involvement of a dozen team members. Well done everyone!
Customers may now register for an account using a credit card and spin up ReliaCloud Servers running Windows and Linux OS stacks within 90 seconds. Services are billed using a standard hourly pricing model at rates starting around $0.05/hr.
We teamed up with Vmops to build our cloud platform and we leverage all of the features their cloud orchestration solution offers. Our platform developers really focused on security during this initial release. Each ReliaCloud customer has their own private network space within the cloud platform. The private cloud space is firewalled off from the public Internet. Customers can control what network traffic passes through the firewalls separating their public cloud space and the Internet. While this level of security isn’t necessarily state-of-the-art it is significantly better than what many other cloud providers offer today.
We plan to add new features and capabilities to the platform in the months ahead. Stay tuned!
My company is sponsoring the upcoming CloudCamp on March 2nd and I am giving one of the “Lightning Talks” at the opening of the conference. The event is being hosted at the Microsoft office in Bloomington, MN. I encourage everyone who is interested in cloud computing in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region to attend.
I’m doing a 7 minute presentation of the ReliaCloud platform at the MinneDemo event in February. It’s a good opportunity to network with the developer and tech start-up crowd in the Twin Cities area. I’ve never had to give such a short tech presentation before so I definitely need to fine tune my standard demo presentation.
I’m back after taking a few months off from the blog. Whew, what a busy time in my life — both at work and at home. I’ve now got two kids under the age of 2 at home and they definitely require much of my attention. Don’t get me wrong… I love spending time with my wife and kids but it definitely takes time away from other pursuits.
What’s going to happen with cloud computing in 2010? I think we will see a couple things:
- Greater adoption by enterprises as cloud providers deliver more features
- New cloud vendors trying to carve out market share
- The evolution and rise of PaaS
- Little movement towards a concrete set of cloud computing standards
- Increasing interest in private clouds
Now we’ll have to wait a year to see if I was right!
The Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants recently published an article that I wrote on the topic of cloud computing. The article provides an introduction to cloud computing, costs (time and labor), security concerns, and results from a nationwide survey conducted by VISI in which 150 upper-level management executives voiced their thoughts and concerns regarding cloud computing
Here’s a presentation I recently gave at a webinar sponsored by VISI. I covered some of the basic characteristics and use cases of cloud storage. We also announced some of the details of our upcoming cloud storage product.
Finance & Commerce magazine published an article covering my recent keynote at the Cloud VISION 2009 event in Minneapolis. I think the article does a nice job of presenting both the benefits and risks of cloud computing. And the writer correctly articulated many of the characteristics of the new ReliaCloud platform my team is working on. I was pleased to see quotes from great local technologists such as George Reese and Tom Kieffer. Well done!
