CloudShare Delivers 4 Million Virtual Machine Hours

CloudShare (News - Alert) has reached an impressive milestone of having delivered 4 million virtual machine hours to date for its business and service provider customers.

The company attributes these record figures to a sharp increase in the number of companies leveraging IT as a Service for IT-intensive lines of business.

CloudShare enables users to create and replicate fully-functional IT environments in the cloud in seconds, giving everyone their own copy. The system allows users to do the same things that they can do on-premises, including saving records, loading data, and integrating with their local enterprise systems.

CloudShare combines aspects of virtualization, cloud computing and web conferencing to provide an integrated technology and communications platform for delivering IT to and collaborating with clients and colleagues.

There are two versions:

CloudShare Pro allows individual users and small teams to share simple, multi-VM environments.

CloudShare Enterprise runs enterprise-grade applications used for virtual training, presales demos, POCs and evaluations. It includes advanced user management, channel hierarchy, analytics and collaboration features.

CloudShare came about initially as a sales tool. Role models for the start-up were salesforce.com and WebEx.

Kevin Epstein, CloudShare's vice president of marketing, recently told TMCnet that the company has been successful over the last three years because of the need for "instant gratification for IT." "We're an instant gratification culture," Epstein added.

He says that users often are interested in the company's options for increased productivity and savings on the bottom line. Epstein says that the payback period can be within the quarter.

They often think to themselves, "I don't care what IT does, just give me my system now," Epstein said.

"As a customer, when I come in, I don't want a blank machine. It doesn't help very much," Epstein said. Users would have to spend a week uploading the needed software, Epstein said.

CloudShare focuses on the United States, with customers all over the world. "We suspect the next market will be in Europe," Epstein said.

 The majority of its revenues come from larger enterprises and service providers.

Epstein also sees a trend where service providers are becoming resellers, with an opportunity for them to be in the marketplace, in something like private label cloud exchange.

CloudShare expects to soon introduce more features that relate to business needs. These include: analytics, security, and more options in the private label marketplace.

When it comes to cloud computing in general, Epstein said there is not enough understanding of the cloud.

"There is unfortunately a lot of hype," Epstein said. He says: There is still the traditional world of hosting. There are internal data centers, which are virtualized. And there are emerging new businesses, which are possible.

In reality, most business users don't need to understand details on cloud computing. They just want their needs met. The question they have, according to Epstein, is, "Does it meet my business needs … instantly?"