Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alex Osipov, CTO of OS33 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: And how many of these kinds of managed services providers are out there?

Alex Osipov: In the U.S. I think there are 56,000.

SM: Fifty-six thousand. Wow.

AO: Imagine how many small and medium businesses there are all over the world. Most of them aren’t doing their own IT.

SM: How many of those do you work with … hundreds, thousands?

AO: We only work with partners that are somewhat larger. The minimum license we sell is 300 users, so if you’re a provider that has fewer than 300 accounts, we have a provider that will resell you but a little bit lower than us. It’s for resellers. We don’t sell any accounts that are smaller than 300 end users. That’s about $5 million in revenue yearly.

SM: Three hundred users as in 300 business or 300 users?

AO: Users. You can spread that out any way you want. If you want to have one company with 300 users or 300 companies with one user.

SM: OK. Got it. Is your pricing model based on a per user pricing?

AO: Yes. It’s per user plus all the services. It’s utility billing, so whatever you use is what you pay for, plus the per user fees. Because we aggregate a lot of different solutions, Microsoft, Intel, and so on, we give you a unified bill. We try to work in the common denominator across all of these.

SM: What else about what you do and the ecosystem in which you play is worth discussing?

AO: The data story. Technologies that we’ve really seen pick up are the Google Drives, the Amazon Drives, the Sky Drives, and the Dropboxes of the world. OS33 has something along the lines of that where we bring together different storage options on the back end, and we don’t require a business to let go of its old IT. The company can keep running Windows and use cloud storage from Amazon and use SharePoint storage to meet its needs. Then we have a nice UI to the end users so they can access it from anywhere, mobile device, local native computer. We’re one of the only providers that offers Web apps integration. That works across any storage, including Microsoft. It’s a nice, easy way for end users to get to all of their files no matter where they are, and the business can choose where to keep those files. With the Google Drives, you have to move all of your data, and everything looks great then, but there are a lot of times when you can’t do that because of all the other systems that depend on it.

SM: You provide a bus that has those interfaces with various different cloud technologies?

AO: Yes. I didn’t call it a bus, but if you want to that’s OK.

SM: What would be the word you would use?

AO: We call it OS33 honestly. In the industry, there is a cloud service brokerage. I think our service is in the cloud service brokerage report. That’s one of the quadrants we fit into, but I don’t think that’s the only one. When you think about the glue in between, that would be the cloud service brokerage.

SM: The whole integration problem around cloud computing is a very mucky problem. It sounds like you are providing a solution to the integration problem.

AO: Yes. We were kind of in the integration-as-a-service category, but typically, that’s reserved for more on the programming side. Cloud service brokerage is closer to what we do. That’s what we’ve been working on for many years now.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alex Osipov, CTO of OS33
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