NEWS	Week's Top News | Alliances | Business/Finance Product Launches | Trends

November 6, 2000

Feature by Lisa Phifer,
VP Core Competence, Inc.

Loudcloud Inc has been wooing ASPs with an attractive proposition: Focus on your own core competency — application service delivery — by letting the experts build a robust, reliable, massively-scalable infrastructure, customized to fit your needs. See related ASPnews article, Loudcloud Aims to Tap the Booming ASP Market

How well has Loudcloud delivered on this promise to date? As the old adage says, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. ASPnews decided to check this out by speaking to Loudcloud's announced ASP customers — Catapulse, eDeploy.com, Interelate, Mercury Interactive, and StatementOne.

StatementOne went live at the beginning of the summer with a site hosted at Loudcloud's Exodus facility. According to CIO Larry Greenberg, "Loudcloud assigned a team to get StatementOne live. Their drive to get the job done was unprecedented. We have made some enhancements to our environment since going live." StatementOne, owned by Fundscape.com, provides web-based consolidated statements and performance reporting to financial institutions and their advisors, clients, and investors.

Catapulse Inc is in production mode with a few early access customers, according to COO Dan Shiffman.

"We've been involved with Loudcloud since the early days of our company's existence — about a year now," said Shiffman. "We're probably one of Loudcloud's more demanding customers. They've been willing to work with us on aggressive schedules." Catapulse, founded by the duo who built Rational Software, will deliver hosted software development services to customers like IBM — see more about Catapulse in ASPnews.com's Nov 4th 2000: Weekly Review.

Interelate Inc is a customer intelligence ASP. By analyzing client data, Interelate helps businesses to better understand their customers. "We're now in the process of migrating solutions, staged in our Minneapolis R&D center, to Loudcloud's San Jose production environment," said Kurt Bertelsen, Interelate VP and CTO.

"At the moment, we're heavily using the Stress Cloud to test the viability of our solutions. We're evaluating our internal customers to determine production rollout," he said. One gating factor: converting from MS-SQL to Oracle, the production DBMS agreed upon by Interelate and Loudcloud.

eDeploy.com Inc is just now being provisioned for Loudcloud services. "This process normally only takes 4 or 5 weeks to complete," said founder and CTO Robert Gadd. "That's fantastic, given our last hosting experience took 5 months to get going and never worked." eDeploy is waiting for Netscape iPlanet v6 to emerge from Loudcloud's engineering certification process.

"We would be live now if we hadn't made this request to switch to the new version of IPlanet," said Gadd. eDeploy, a Datatec Systems subsidiary, will operate a secure portal for web-based project collaboration by customers, suppliers, and business partners.

Mercury Interactive, a web performance management company, was one of the first customers announced by Loudcloud. Loudcloud also partners with Mercury Interactive, using LoadRunner and Topaz platforms to deliver Stress and Transaction Monitoring Smart Cloud services. We were thus surprised when Mercury Interactive declined to comment on its customer relationship with Loudcloud. Both companies confirm that Mercury is a Loudcloud customer and partner. However, "the [customer] relationship is truly in its early stages," said PR rep Greg Cornelison. "We just are not doing much with them at this point in terms of infrastructure provisioning."

Why Loudcloud?

The four ASPs that spoke with us — Catapulse, eDeploy.com, Interelate, and Statement.com — all chose to outsource infrastructure to Loudcloud for similar reasons.

Catapulse wanted to build a team quickly and focus on its own solution, not on delivering infrastructure. "Loudcloud let us put up a hosted solution without having to worry about management, databases, operating systems, bandwidth, and connectivity. With their help, we've been able to boot up very quickly," said Shiffman.

"We chose Loudcloud because of their expertise in the architecture it takes to make a successful Internet application, their intense focus on customer satisfaction, and because they are optimized for dealing with companies such as ours," he said. "They're also just nice people - an attribute that is often undervalued."

Loudcloud's expert staff was also very important to Interelate. "We came across the strategy of co-location because we didn't want to build a data center ourselves," said Bertelsen "But we also realized that there were a lot of people in that equation. We decided to look for a partner who could offer top-tier people support for architecture design and managed services. Loudcloud rose to the top. We inked our alliance in June, and have been working with them for several months now."

Knowledge and experience were major considerations for eDeploy.com. "We got burned by another ASP hosting vendor whose service turned out to be spotty and unreliable," said Gadd. "You can't fake this stuff! It all comes down to having smart, motivated and responsive people. In the end, it's all generally the same hardware, software, and middleware. The level of service must be based on planning, project management and execution. At this point in time, Loudcloud has not disappointed us in any way."

Tools:

Add aspnews.com to your favorites Add aspnews.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x

Back to News Trends