Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about WordPress versus DreamHost. WordPress is also open source. It’s also extensible. It’s extremely popular. What’s the distinction between the two?

Simon Anderson: DreamHost is the platform upon which WordPress runs. We are a contributor to WordPress code. Members of our team participate actively in the release cycle of WordPress. We have WordPress specialist developers who, for various releases, have taken a leadership role in terms of the community release of the next version. The relationship between WordPress and DreamHost is we actively participate in the WordPress community. We are a well-known platform to run WordPress on. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on your industry. Help me understand the before and after. I understand you said they’re either on-premise or on the cloud, and they’re not on the cloud with industry-specific work flows. Let’s double-click down on that concept. What kinds of systems were they using? What kind of systems are you replacing? What’s happening in each of these industries?

David Schmaier: Let’s take Sky Italia. Sky Italia is a pay TV provider serving 5 million households in Italy. When you go to Europe and you turn on the TV, you see Sky channels. It’s part of that parent company. Sky was previously using Siebel Communications with industry-specific on-premise CRM.

Sramana Mitra: Isn’t that where you were before? Didn’t you work at Siebel before?
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s actually double-click a little bit into the core use cases that your company enables. Pick whatever client that you want to double-click down into. Walk us through the value proposition and the problem you are solving.

Simon Anderson: Our core platform product is our website hosting platform where a customer can sign up for a very low monthly fee. They basically get a work bench that they can program. They can set up a personal blog. Typically, we’re a very big WordPress host. We’re one of the biggest in the world in terms of the number of installs. We also do other platforms like Joomla. Our core use case is we have a very large user base who use us for blogging and developing their own small business website or their own hobby website. Examples of customers are long tail bloggers. They choose to use a platform like DreamHost as distinct from the free platform because they just get a lot of ability to customize. They can run any plug-in they want, provided it doesn’t present a security issue. They get Shell access to our shared hosting environment so that they can work at the command line if they wish. There’s a great amount of flexibility, which is appealing to that type of customer who is very aspirational to learn more. It spans all the way through to customers like Pink Floyd. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 1)

David was on the founding team of Siebel, back at the very beginning of the CRM industry. Now, with Vlocity, he is focusing on the next wave of industry-specific cloud solutions. Excellent discussion on the future of enterprise software.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to the company and also to yourself.

David Schmaier: I’m the CEO and founder of Vlocity. Vlocity is the leading provider of industry cloud applications on the Salesforce platform. We deliver industry-specific applications in the cloud for four industries: communications and media, insurance, health insurance, and public sector.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company? How long have you been around? What size are you at?

David Schmaier: It’s not venture-funded. It’s funded by myself and several people who founded a prior company called Veeva Systems. The three Veeva founders founded this company. We funded the company. Recently, we had some strategic partners who wanted to become investors. We >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost (Part 1)

The topic of this discussion is OpenSource Content Management and its evolution.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about yourself and DreamHost.

Simon Anderson: I’m the CEO of DreamHost. We are a cloud computing web hosting company that tries to be radically different in the industry and has done so for about 17 years since the company was started back in the late 90s. How we do that is, we’ve long been serving the long tail of web professionals and developers and aspiring individuals and entrepreneurs who are looking to leverage the web not only for themselves in terms of distributing content, but also ultimately for other people.

For many years going back to the early days of Linux, we’ve been big proponents of both using open source software ourselves and many other open source tools. In addition to that, we have been believers of open source, which started out as a software business model, but has evolved to be much bigger than that. It’s a way of engaging on big problems and bringing groups together to solve them in much more elegant and >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a company today, what kind of open problems would you be leaning towards?

Mike Potts: I think the market is starving for some automation and folks that can bring it in. In other words, whatever can be done to take security intelligence and make that more predictive with a high degree of accuracy that can quickly discern good from bad. Even in service firms, there are only so many people who can handle some of these complex challenges. We inevitably have more and more managed service providers. I think there’s a great focus and opportunity in trying to deliver this technology that can benefit masses versus a user at a time. I think predictive analytics and also cloud-based service offerings are areas that I look at as an investor in a couple of different venture funds.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else that you want to share? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope (Part 4)

Mike Potts: Going back to the insider threats, we’re seeing more investments going into the interior of the network to understand the nature of the insider attack. More than 50% of the attacks are beginning to emulate from the inside whether that is the user on the network who is maliciously or unknowingly doing things that he or she shouldn’t be doing, or the adversary actually logging on to your network because they have compromised credentials. That’s happening many times. Take Target for example. It was a result of a contractor who compromised their credentials.

We’re seeing a more important thrust of protecting the inner core of the network because that’s where the valuable data exists. It used be credit cards, but credit cards have short shelf lives and can be replaced. The information now that these criminals have access to and are seeking are the healthcare files, social security numbers, and personal information that have a much longer shelf life and leads to all types of extortion from a >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Take one of your customers and take us through how this all works. What points do you start monitoring? What kinds of things do you find? Walk us through a use case.

Mike Potts: We can take HP as an example. We got a large use case on our site as well as theirs. Despite the fact that they have a SIM technology which is ArcSight or Tipping Point, they are still not able to get complete contextual visibility into the entire network. We’re turning their switches and routers into sensors and populating that data into our engine to give them visibility as to what’s transversing the network. We’re collecting this metadata off of switches and routers in hundreds of thousands of flows per second. >>>