Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything substantially different in any other segment of customers that you cater to besides the two use cases we discussed?Emil Sayegh: You have SaaS customers that are similar to the e-commerce value proposition.Sramana Mitra: These are SaaS customers who are themselves public cloud vendors?Emil Sayegh: They are public SaaS vendors. They’re leveraging our cloud infrastructure to offer SaaS to consumers.Sramana Mitra: What are we seeing in that segment? That’s an interesting segment. I’m sure you have a customer base in that segment.Emil Sayegh: Yes, we have a great customer base in that segment. They’re very similar to an e-commerce customer from the fact that if their application is down, their whole business is down. We cater to companies that make their living off their web presence. SaaS companies’ value proposition is very similar to the e-commerce customers. From an architecture standpoint, they are also similar because a SaaS company needs to scale up very quickly at the front-end with as many users that are logged in at that point. They need to create as many of those sections as they can.I’m going to give you this odd example. We have one company that provides SaaS to agencies that are involved in rescue efforts and act in times of disaster. When there are no disasters in the United States or in the world, they’re probably not very busy. But as soon as there is a disaster, then you have a bunch of agencies that are descending on one region and they need to be able to process the cases. It’s kind of like Salesforce on steroids but focused on disaster recovery. That’s their specialty. In terms of need, they scale up extremely quickly. They spin up a bunch of cloud instances in the front-end. They may add a couple of database servers in the back-end so that they can accommodate that load.This is an unusual example that I’d like to give for SaaS companies that benefit from the hybrid infrastructure because the corollary of this is if you were to go with a monolithic, either cloud or dedicated, they would have to essentially commit and get a bunch of dedicated servers – if they want the performance – or they had to just get stuck with just cloud and suffer from a performance standpoint. When a disaster happens, they may clobber their database servers and their database servers may stop working in the most immediate time of need. If they get a database server that’s dedicated and they get a bunch of cloud servers that are just invoked at time of need, that is the optimal, most economical, and highest performance solution that they can have.