Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr (Part 5)

Sebastian Stadil: An example would be a healthcare provider that makes a survey of all the cloud management platforms available in the market and determines that none meets all of its requirements. They start using cloud and they build their own tooling. After a while, they find that the processes that they’re bringing to the cloud are not fit for it. Then they start to revise their processes and become a bit more standardized. They start using the best practices. That’s when they become good candidates to start using the cloud management platform.

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a company today, what are the open areas where you would advise entrepreneurs to start a company today?

Sebastian Stadil: I see a lot of people talking about the Internet of Things. I don’t think that the timing is right for those. If you look at society in the perspective of the last couple hundreds of years, we’ve gone from farmers to factory workers to knowledge workers. But when you see that general trend, what happens is humans are specializing more and more. You have a lawyer that practices a specific area of the law. You have mathematicians that are no longer generalists. We’re going towards specialization.

The advantage of specialization is you get the absolute best to do something. What we’re seeing in the economy is a separation of processes and the assignment of each of these processes to a specialist. An example would be the management of data centers. There’s no reason for a Walmart or a Morgan Stanley to have to manage their own data centers. What they do is they outsource that to a data center provider that specializes in that. The ongoing trend here is that there’re more of those processes that are able to be assigned to an external vendor.

In the case of cloud, the infrastructure provisioning that used to not be outsourced to another company can now be outsourced. That’s what happened in 2006 and 2007. Amazon became this self-service provider of virtual machines. If you continue that trend, an entrepreneur should be able to look into the things that are being done by companies today that don’t serve their customers directly. A good example would be if you have Walmart that has to manage security for their infrastructure. Security for their cloud infrastructure is not something that their customers will pay money for. That would be one way. It’s if you can find a way of building software that allows them to offload that security process to the vendor, then that would be a fantastic opportunity.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr
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