Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Knipple, CTO of EasyStreet (Part 1)

Steve Knipple lays out a clear picture of the managed cloud infrastructure-as-a-service space, including a great pointer to open problems that customers are asking for solutions to. Cloud entrepreneurs, take note.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as EasyStreet.

Steve Knipple: I’m the Chief Technology Officer of EasyStreet Corporation based out of Beaverton, Oregon. We’re a company in transition right now. We have been in business for about 20 years and we have followed the technological trends and improved ourselves over those 20 years. Today, we’re primarily a managed services company and increasingly, we are seeing ourselves as a service integration and management company for the hybrid services world. We believe very strongly that cloud computing and all the services today will be delivered in a hybrid model and EasyStreet is building itself to be a service provider for that hybrid world.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of services do you provide?

Steve Knipple: We do three primary services. We do colocation. Colocation was a very large business for us in the past. By far, the core of our business is infrastructure-as-a-service deployed in a highly available dedicated private cloud. We also have a public cloud offering that is instance-based computing based on the utility model. That’s a smaller portion of our business. Where we are primarily focused right now is in infrastructure-as-a-service and extending that infrastructure-as-a-service into advance management capabilities like security and compliance.

Sramana Mitra: Give me a sense of the scale of the business. You’re a 20-year-old company. What kind of scale are you upgrading at?

Steve Knipple: It’s very interesting. EasyStreet’s trajectory took a very strong upward trend about two years ago. We started in 1995. As a matter of fact, that’s the origin of EasyStreet. Back in 1995, the Internet was called the information superhighway and the founders of the company thought that was a good thing to call the company. EasyStreet had a real good record of success in those ISP days. Then it converted into a traditional colocation and managed services company in the late 90’s and the early 2000’s.

What really gave us explosive growth in the order of 50% a year starting in about 2011 is when we started virtualization platforms and infrastructure-as-a-service. Today, we have three data centers – Portland area, two in Beaverton, and one in downtown Portland. We buy colocation spaces in Phoenix from I-O Data and we have a large deployment down there. We’re in the process of a nationwide expansion of our managed services.

Sramana Mitra: Could you give me some form of metrics in terms of how many customers you have, what segment of customers you cater to, and what kind of revenue numbers you do?

Steve Knipple: The customers that we’re targeting are broken into two clear segments. We provide infrastructure-as-a-service for platform-as-a-service and for software-as-a-service companies. These companies are scaled large enough and may have some special compliance or performance requirements that make them want a private cloud. 50% of our new revenue is infrastructure-as-a-service for SaaS and PaaS providers – traditional e-commerce. About 50% of our business goes to the traditional enterprise market. These are companies that want to start sourcing some of their traditional IT to a cloud services company and they may not be exactly sure where they want to put it.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Knipple, CTO of EasyStreet
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