infoTECH Feature

September 07, 2010

IT as a Service - Innovations from CloudShare

(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot in San Jose as part of TMCnet’s “On the Road” video series. To view the entire library of videos from Road Shows and other industry shows, as well as product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit the TMCnet Videos home page.)

Is it possible to enjoy IT as a service? It is if you turn to CloudShare. To learn more about this innovative company, TMC’s (News - Alert) Rich Tehrani recently spoke with Kevin Epstein, vice president of marketing and products at CloudShare. Their conversation was captured in a video.

CloudShare (News - Alert) is an IT-as-a-Service company; there’s been a lot around hype lately cloud and the name is not hype.

As Epstein notes, there are people offering IT as a service and people offering infrastructure as a service – which are just blank machines. Cloud hosters have not gotten past this concept of providing the “blank machine”.

CloudShare is more like the Dell (News - Alert) model where you get everything you need to set up shop. Flexibility and scalability are nearly infinite. The company has seen a dramatic spike in interest for its service. In fact, in the last three months went from 1 million hours served to over 4 million hours served.

As for the future: “So, we’ve seen interest from our service provider customers, for our private label services,” said Epstein. “You can come to CloudShare and sign up for us and use us for your own IT service or you can also access CloudShare through other providers. It’s instant IT as a service. You click a button and your have IT.”

There is significant interest in that type of market concept. Many customers are looking to market share and Epstein highlights that the CloudShare approach is similar to the Salesforce.com (News - Alert) sharing platform. Epstein stresses users should value CloudShare not because they are hosting machines, but because they are providing the IT on top of it. CloudShare offers a free service – customers can build their own IT environment, selecting the apps they want and then give out copies to whoever they want.

The Base Pro product is never charged, but they don’t want you to build the product and give it out to thousands. They do apply some limits, but the flexibility is immense for a free solution.

To learn more, check out the video in full.


Ed Silverstein is a contributing editor for TMCnet's InfoTech Spotlight. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Ed Silverstein
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