The Hausman interview: CloudPhysics' analytics strategy revealed

SaaS product development

WTH: What is happening with your SaaS product?

JH: Yes, what I also see now with our SaaS-based product is a democratisation in IT. If you are a customer and you want to work with a particular partner, in the past there was a lot of geographical focus. You would either work with partners that were regionally located, or you had large multinational or global partners that you could work in local geographies.

With the SaaS model, any partner with a particular set of expertise can be enabled. That is a new opportunity.

WTH: Will you be focusing on a primarily indirect sales model in that way, or will you be employing local sales forces?

JH: We have a mix right now and I see both of those continuing over time.

That said, I certainly see great opportunity in keeping our approach channel friendly. When I was at Veritas I literally in one year shifted sales from 70/30 direct to a 30/70 indirect. So we went to an indirect model and we enabled the partners and grew that business dramatically through the years.

There is great opportunity to scale with the partner in the ecosystem. We will always support customers who will come directly to us. That is just the nature of a SaaS application. But there is an ability to do both. This is really where I can see it us going.

WTH: How does your product relate to Virtual Instruments; I spoke with its CEO John Thompson a while back.

JH: I think we are different. The things that Virtual Instruments are doing are going deep in into the physical infrastructure, (laughing), which is ironic considering the name.

I don’t see us going there. Our focus is literally virtual environments. We are looking at platform expansion. I know you talked with John about this in the past. We started with VMware because of the pedigree of our founding organisation team, but we certainly have our eyes on other hypervisors and other markets. Whether that is moving in to the open environments are things that are on our roadmap and thoughts process.

I think the focus for us right now is on HyperV, and maybe at a later phase Dockers. In fact one of the things that we find is a lot of people that come to the side and give us feedback, such as: “This is great, where do you have the HyperV version, so I can use that? Because I am not a VMware shop.”

WTH: Aside from the US and Europe, how do you view the Asian market?

JH: I see it as a very big opportunity for us. One of our very early adopted customers, who has been going on for years, is actually a service provider in Australia. So we have relationships there. That service provider is also working with us and helping to promote, and get others in that geography.

Ironically, my Head of Sales is also from Australia. We also have pretty aggressive activities going on with very large partners and very large costumers over in Japan.

During stints at previous companies I've done much business in Asia, so I see the same opportunity for us here at CloudPhysics. Asia is definitely the fastest growing market, something that can't be ignored.

WTH: How about China, specifically?

JH: We haven’t focused yet on China. China is always an interesting one to crack. Not being a large multinational ourself, it is a little bit harder right now. Given we have so many other opportunities and the investments required over there. I am focusing on the easier countries to execute now and we will figure that out as we go.

WTH: India?

JH: Actually, we have a partner in India that reached out to us that we are establishing a relationship with. I also spend a lot of time in India, having development teams over the years.

So there are additional relationships that we have. India is a little bit easier to get business going than with China. I did have development teams in China in Symantec, but it is still a little bit harder to get in.

WTH: Thank you very much for the open talk Jeff. Stay tuned for more news about CloudPhysics! ®