Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 6)

Sramana: How have revenues ramped at SOASTA?

Tom Lounibos: We are still under $20 million  in revenue but have ramped up substantially over the past three years.

Sramana: When you look at how the industry is evolving, where do you see the cloud computing and mobile computing markets going?

Tom Lounibos: You can’t turn in any direction without running into a conversation about cloud computing. Most of our customers are looking at it as the “platform du jour” because it gives them elasticity to ramp and meet consumer demands. It is driven by the mobile market. That market is very hot, with more and more apps coming out all the time. Businesses want the elasticity in their platforms to handle mobile devices.

It does not have any direct impact on our success or failure because we are just a user of it. As long as there are cloud servers available to us to allow us to meet our customers’ needs, we don’t see any issues. We have ramped to 350,000 servers. On any given day we may use 10,000 servers, so we have plenty of room there. Cloud computing is here to stay, and I do not see it going away anytime soon at the enterprise level or any other level for that matter. It may have even more appeal at the small and midsized marketplace.

Sramana: As an example, we have just seen Zynga become a multi-billion-dollar company very quickly. Expectations are that companies will continue to grow  rapidly because of the number of people with Internet access who are using cloud solutions and mobile devices. There is greater access to online products for various types of consumers. There are droves of new vendors every day. Do these new companies know about you?

Tom Lounibos: I have spoken at pretty much every cloud event for the past five years. I have been a keynote speaker on multiple occasions because our application is such a killer app for their environment. There are not many companies, including Zynga, that need 1,000 servers for a couple of hours, after which time they expect them to be spun down. We are known the most to the enterprise cloud service. We get a lot of gaming companies and social media companies that have some very good use cases. From an enterprise standpoint, we have been defined by many publications as the killer app for cloud computing. At any given point and time we can spin up 10,000 servers, test a site or application, and then spin those servers down. That capability is unique, and it has led to a lot of people knowing about us.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos
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