Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 5)

Sramana: How do you compare to Mercury and Silk from a cost competitive standpoint?

Tom Lounibos: We charge $1,500 an hour. They charge $60,000 an hour. There is a lot more to it, but that is the simple way to look at it.

Sramana: Are there new players entering this space?

Tom Lounibos: Yes, and that is a pretty cool thing. There are a lot of open source companies as well as some new venture-funded companies. There are about 25 new players that are running into this space as fast as they can. We think that is pretty cool. It validates our original vision that the cloud testing market is vibrant and that there could be a couple of billion-dollar companies that emerge in the cloud testing market. The testing market has always had three or four billion-dollar companies. We think the cloud testing market will be the same.

Sramana: Is your business primarily with cloud vendors? Do you service any enterprise IT that has cloud solutions?

Tom Lounibos: This has been one of my biggest surprises. When we started off, I thought our clients would be cloud application companies. Back then, 90% of our customers were not in the cloud. We have a large amount of enterprise customers in the retail space. We have U.S. retailers who have their application behind the firewall and use vendors like IBM, Rackspace, and Terremark.

There are a number of new companies that are deploying on Amazon. We don’t care where the application is deployed. It can be deployed behind a traditional firewall or in a public cloud. We partner with almost every cloud vendor. We have access to over 350,000 cloud servers around the world through partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, GoGrid, and others. We have 17 different APIs that give us that capability.

Sramana: Whom do you sell to when you approach a potential client, and what size client do you look for?

Tom Lounibos: We look for all sizes of clients. The nice thing about our pricing model is that it is very consumable in both the low and high ends. At the low end we have a free product where people can do a 100 virtual user test. Thousands of people download that product from our website on a daily basis.

We also have a SaaS-based model that requires no touch. We have distribution channels such as IBM’s Global Services division, as well as our own direct sales organization. There is also a growing group of what I call system integration firms that are dedicated to testing who are embracing our product. This strategy has given us multiple distribution channels.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos
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