Cloud Scars: Lessons from the Enterprise Pioneers

Editor's Notes

• #3: NOTES: What does ServiceMesh do… ServiceMesh sells enterprise software to the Global 2000. Regarding market category… if you over-simplify it… you could say we’re a software company in the Cloud Mgmt space… although that’s a very limiting description. What ServiceMesh really does is help large enterprises adopt what we call “Agile IT operating models”. Cloud is part of this…but its much more than simply moving workloads to the cloud… which we see as very tactical… at least from an enterprise customer perspective.  The more strategic market opportunity to us is providing standardized and fully governed “as-a-service” offerings (including infrastructure and platforms), and leveraging them throughout the SDLC to compress cycle times, reduce complexity, and lower costs. This is done through a variety of ways including…. Self-service provisioning of standardized platforms and infrastructure for Dev and Test teams Software build automation… including fully automating the configuration and build of automated test environments Promoting entire deployment environments seamlessly from Dev to Test to Ops. SDLC should be more than moving the code. Should also automate the tracking, versioning, and promotion of the entire deployment environments. (Big time saver. Not constantly recreating the wheel. All assets versioned.)If you do this successfully, Developers focus more of their time writing code instead of IT trouble tickets and resources requests. And IT groups can redirect more of their time to being more innovative and business-driven.  2) That’s where our product comes in. Our software product offering is called the Agility Platform. It provides a unified governance, security, and lifecycle management layer for that portfolio of “as a service” offerings. It’s a lifecycle management platform…. so it helps automate workload planning, building, publishing, deployment and monitoring in the context of an end-to-end workflow. It also places a heavy emphasis on policy-based governance, security, and making workloads portable so they can deploy across heterogeneous internal and external clouds.  3) As a company, we’ve been working on these challenges since early 2008 with large enterprise customers. We feel fortunate to have gotten a good head start.  In many ways, we think the Agility Platform has been ahead of the market…. Particularly in terms of our lifecycle management and governance approach. I think we can attribute that to our early exposure to our enterprise customer engagements. Our first customer 3.5 years ago was a Global bank with a $1B annual IT budget… and that continues to fit the general profile of our customers ever since. They’re all Global 2000 enterprises.  4) As a company, we’ve performed very well. (3X growth, profitable)ServiceMesh closed 2010 with a third consecutive year of profitability and tripled year-over-year revenues. ServiceMesh won the coveted UP-START 2010 award for “Fastest Growing Cloud Computing Company.”To keep pace with global demand for its offerings, ServiceMesh opened or expanded offices in Los Angeles, New York City, Austin, London, and Sydney.In 2010, ServiceMesh provided six major product releases of their flagship Agility Platform 5) We’re a global company. We have customers in NA, EMEA, and AP.