Gemini Cloud Computing Round Table

This post was written by Assaf Frenkel, an Associate at Gemini, following another Round Table event that we recently hosted (We have done a few of those in the past few years, focusing on various topics).

Gemini is increasingly looking at opportunities around cloud computing. We invested in companies that provide cloud services like IT Structures (cloud service for virtual sales engagement), and in companies like Outbrain (blog ratings) that utilize the cloud for getting an elastic IT platform.  Last Thursday we had a round table on cloud computing, hosting several startup companies and guest speaker Martin Buhr, the European Business Development Director of Amazon Web Services. It was a great opportunity to hear Amazon's vision and specifically, to get Martin's insights on the market and to listen to real-life stories from the startups that use cloud computing and Amazon's web services.

Amazon is a leader in providing cloud services, provides companies a pay per use model and options to scale rapidly high and down, turning CAPEX to OPEX – all words investors like us love (Side comment here from Danny: In a panel 2 years ago I claimed, on stage, that using Amazon's services was a negative for startups. Clearly, I had no idea what I was talking about. At least we learn over time…).

Some key takeaways from the discussions:

Concerns for developers

• Quality of Service/Availability – what happens when concurrent picks over the public cloud occur?
• Dependency in cloud SP –since there are no standard APIs, and different clouds support different basic services (e.g. till recently availability of windows support), choosing the cloud provider is not only a commercial decision but also a technology choice with high migration costs
• Licensing – how are 3^rd party licenses of handled (e.g. Oracle DB), when current models are not pay per use?

 

Cloud infrastructure

• Amazon is increasing their stack, currently providing monitoring services and load balancing. This might pose a challenge for companies that develop cloud infrastructure layers that may need to also increase their own to provide greater ROI.
• Opportunities can come from cross cloud initiatives, or from vertical VAS which are less likely to be taken by the infrastructure players.  

   

Cloud for Enterprises

• Enterprises are slow in adopting public clouds. There is initial usage of public clouds by enterprises for non critical missions, or non sensitive data. En example could be a financial institute running analysis on historical data
• Large Enterprises and government are starting to use private clouds
• This is in line with what we heard from Gemini CIO Advisory board and in the world summit of cloud computing.

   

Here's a link to our web page with event pictures.

Comments

[Ori Lahav]

Hey Danny & Assaf.
To put things correctly,
Outbrain was using AWS for serving our JavaScript files but, ~6 months ago, due to bad performance of the S3 and terrible support from the AWS team we left the service in favor of a regular CDN company. more info here:
http://olahav.typepad.com/weblog_files/2008/06/amazon-aws---i.html

Outbrain is still looking seriously at AWS as well as other public cloud services, mostly for heavy duty, non critical tasks.

Clouds and Grids are very interesting technologies that we are using/implementing in order to handle the vast amount of data we process and use. with 'clouds', the 'sky' is the limit :)