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Ostrato |
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October 14, 2013 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Simplifying the Enterprise Cloud Experience |
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About Ostrato Ostrato’s cloud service manager enables organizations to leverage the power of cloud computing environments, while providing IT a centralized platform to help federate, scale and adopt cloud services while delivering a superior customer experience. Ostrato cloudSM is designed specifically for enterprises that want an integrated approach to governing and managing their heterogeneous cloud services, whether they are public, private or hybrid. The platform provides tools to ensure that the cloud is utilized to the best advantage across multiple groups and instances in terms of cost, performance, features, functionality and geographic location. More information can be found at www.ostrato.com.
Jay Chapel serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Ostrato, Inc. Prior to joining Ostrato, Chapel was the Director of Sales for Nexthink, a provider of end-user analytics software starting up operations in NA. Before Nexthink, Chapel spent 10+ years with Micromuse and IBM Tivoli, a provider of business-critical software to telecommunications, finance, and public sector clients. Micromuse was acquired by IBM, during which Chapel led the successful sales integration and subsequent growth of the IBM Tivoli/Netcool business in Europe. Chapel held several regional and worldwide sales roles with IBM Tivoli in Switzerland, the UK and the US.
Before Micromuse/IBM, Chapel held several financial roles with Teleglobe and SRA. Chapel has 3 kids and is an alumnus of West Virginia, where his undergraduate degree is in Finance. He also holds an MBA.
“The vision for the company is to unify and simplify the enterprise cloud experience. What we mean by that is, as IT becomes more of a service provider internally, providing on premise and off premise services to the different business units, we provide a single pane-of-glass which allows IT to federate, provision, govern, manage and report on various public and private cloud services from a central console.” – Jay Chapel |
Cloud Management
Ostrato 21351 Gentry Drive #255 Sterling, VA, 20166 703-444-4733
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Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor,
CEOCFO Magazine, Published – October 14, 2013 CEOCFO: Mr. Chapel, what is the vision for Ostrato? What does the company do? Mr. Chapel: The vision for the company is to unify and simplify the enterprise cloud experience. What we mean by that is, as IT becomes more of a service provider internally, providing on premise and off premise services to the different business units, we provide a single pane-of-glass which allows IT to federate, provision, govern, manage and report on various public and private cloud services from a central console.
CEOCFO: Who is your typical user? Mr. Chapel: A typical user would be someone in IT that is building up infrastructure for a service or an application / service to be developed and deployed within an enterprise.
CEOCFO: Why go through Ostrato? Why not go directly to some of the providers? Mr. Chapel: Some people do go to the providers, but what happens is if you are an end user and/or an organization and you are using multiple cloud service providers, both public and private and also a few hybrids, then you have multiple log ins, you have multiple reporting mechanisms, you do not have a single governance model that allows you to tap into, for example, leveraging active directory for single sign on for those end users. Then the ability to govern, manage and report on that process across multiple instances becomes much more cumbersome.
CEOCFO: What was the key to putting together the technology at Ostrato? I am suspecting it was not very easy to implement, initially. Mr. Chapel: No. We actually started about a year ago, last fall. We had a couple of federal customers. Our CTO worked for a service management company and they kept coming across this requirement within different agencies. They evaluated some different technologies out there and found that some of them had some features but did not really have the overall “end-to-end” capabilities that the customer required, including provisioning, federating, managing, governing, procuring, reporting, billing; across multiple cloud providers. Therefore, we started building the software and we spun that out and started the company in the spring (May 2013) based on a couple of pilots that we had in place.
CEOCFO: Is there a difference in creating this system from multiple cloud providers as opposed to multiple providers in general or is it that you are focusing on the cloud, specifically? Mr. Chapel: We are focusing on cloud, specifically. Right now more emphasis seems to be on infrastructure as a service, because that is where things are more commoditized. However, I think that as companies evolve and use more platforms as a service; database as a service for example, within IT and the other business units, then it is going to be XaaS and it will be irrelevant whether it is Software as a Service or just structured server platforms or data base, for example.
CEOCFO: What is the competitive landscape? Has what you are doing been tried in the past? Mr. Chapel: There are several competitors at various levels. If you read things based on Gartner, Forrester and other analysts, you will see that they have various functional categories: cloud management, cloud marketplace and cloud brokering. There are several different vendors in each of those domains. What we are trying to focus on is actually collapsing cloud management, cloud marketplace and cloud brokering into a single pane-of-glass. We built this based on scale, ease of use and having an open architecture with multiple integration points in the Enterprise. We are taking the model of fault management vendors from ten years ago and applying that to where we think the world has gone in terms of external and internal cloud integrations and IT as a service delivery platform.
CEOCFO: How do you reach potential customers? Mr. Chapel: There are a couple of things. One is the old fashioned way; we call. We do direct calling, a direct campaign. Number two, especially since we are in the DC area, we are actually spending a lot of time working with systems integrators that are supporting and or bidding on the multitude of federal contracts related to cloud, cloud computing, public cloud consumption. Each of those RFPs or RFIs or RFQs has requirements in it for cloud management, cloud brokering, cloud marketplace and basically the overall aggregation of multiple cloud providers into a single pane of glass. Therefore, we are doing a lot of work with Agencies and Systems Integrators. Then the other area that we are focusing on is building out a multi-tenant SaaS version to go after the SMB market by leveraging MSP’s as well.
CEOCFO: When you are speaking with a potential customer do they “get it” immediately? Is there an “aha moment”? Mr. Chapel: Actually, yes and no. We have talked to many people about this over the last several months and frankly it depends on their level of involvement with heterogeneous cloud environments. I think that there is definitely an education part to the sale. We have written a rather robust white paper around educating people on the why and the inherent challenges. There is a lot of activity right now on public cloud, and Gartner, Forrester, and other analyst firms are helping to define the requirements around this space. Therefore, it is an emerging market, to be sure and developing over the next twelve to eighteen months. Gartner puts cloud management and cloud marketplace on the top of its height curve right now. Therefore, the short answer is that some people definitely get it, more so in the federal space, because there are many mandates around that, yet a little less so in the enterprise space, we find.
CEOCFO: It seems that every other day someone is coming up with a new idea, starting a company or providing a service? How do you keep up and have all the correct and accurate information to provide to your customers? Mr. Chapel: We built integrations into Amazon’s API or Microsoft’s API or Rackspace’s API and others. With that integration we are able to spec out the relevant information you need. We do not actually go out and shop the nineteen thousand services or so, that Amazon has for an enterprise. What an enterprise or an agency generally does is they look at Amazon, Rackspace and Terremark and they pick a subset of the services they offer. There might be ten, twenty, thirty or one hundred of those services. Then what we do is we load (import) those services into our service catalog, and then we present them next to each other if a like public service or their private cloud which they have built out. We do not really act as a marketplace for every cloud based service you know that you could access via the internet. It is more of a governed model based on who that enterprise contracts with.
CEOCFO: Are there any tweaks that you would like to add to the mix or plans for changes? Mr. Chapel: When we started the technology about twelve months ago I would say that it was a really new space. We have learned a lot in the last couple of months, related to requirements. We are seeing that security is really top of mind. By security we mean role based access control (RBAC), so that a certain user within that enterprise can see a certain set of information, a different user might be able to see a different set of information and certain types of services they can procure and use. We have seen that as being a very relevant “hot spot” in this space. Also, recording usage and billing or show back data is very important given we provide its for all cloud services in one data source. Many times a cloud service provider cannot go down to an internal project within either an agency or an enterprise and associate the application, service and infrastructure that they are buying from them to a specific project / task order. Therefore, we are getting many requests based on that requirement; especially as you aggregate and look across a hybrid service that might be using private infrastructure and public infrastructure. Then the third area would just be the integrations needed on the back end. By that I mean, within an enterprise integrating with their work flow system or their automation systems and/or their provisioning system, and being able to pull information out of their CMDB if they have their service catalog information in there. Those are the areas that we are focusing as we move forward.
CEOCFO: Development of a new product or service is often costly. Are you funded to take the next steps? Will you be seeking funding in any way to make a possibly bigger push? Mr. Chapel: In that regard, I would say that we have been pretty lucky. We had a solid angel round in May. We have gotten a commitment almost doubling that, which covers us for a very long period of time, even assuming we have no short term revenue. However, we are also trying to go out and talk to VC firms around doing an A-round. We really think that we need to get five million or so in the next six months, I would say, to really “blow out”, if you will, sales, marketing and of course continue to add features, functions and people on the development side. From a funding standpoint we are have a very solid foothold. I just think that the market is exploding here so quickly that more capital you have the better off you will be in terms of getting resources and gaining traction in a rapid expanding market.
CEOCFO: What have you learned in your prior experiences that is serving you well as CEO of Ostrato? Mr. Chapel: That is a good one! I am a “people person”. I have a sales and sales operations background. I think that it is extremely important to find good people that are creative, that are hard working and that feel like they are vested in the success and make sure that they have the right tools in place. That is number one that I have learned from working with some very good senior leadership overtime. I think that number two is clearing hurdles for people. Making sure that they have everything they need to be successful at their job, whatever it is; improving on the demo so that the “aha moment” is there during a customer engagement or making sure that our development team has the resources necessary for success.
CEOCFO: Why does Ostrato standout?
Mr. Chapel:
There are a
couple of reasons. First, from a market standpoint, the public cloud
environment enterprises have spent somewhere close to $130 billion on public
cloud this year. That is going to grow over the next couple of years to well
over $200 billion by 2016. Within that market they have to find a cloud
broker, cloud management and cloud aggregation which is about 10-20 percent
of that spend. Therefore, from that standpoint there will be a lot of spend
associated with managing, curating and governing the various public and
private cloud services that are being used within an enterprise. There is a
transformation right now within enterprises, especially within IT
departments around IT as a service (ITaaS). Therefore, acting more as a
service provider for on prem and off prem services has become very relevant,
and not so much focus on developing those internal systems but providing the
tools and resources to allow the Business to do it on their own but still
provide the Security, Governance, and Operational Management. From that
standpoint we think there is a great market opportunity. We have been lucky
that we are in the Northern Virginia area, so we have had access to a lot of
information / requirement out of the government market, which seems to be
leading the CSB charge per most analysts we have talked to. They get most of
their calls in this space from government clients, agencies and/or systems
integrators working on cloud projects. We have developed a great set of
requirements out of working with the GSA for example, and several systems
integrators in the local area related to what is going to need to be done in
the next twelve to eighteen months. We really have the foundation with our
technology and our orchestration engine to capture those integrated
requirements in terms of scale, interoperability and the back end analytics
on the cloud data that we gather. |
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