1/18/2011
Who we talked to
Potential buyers
Potential Sellers
Industry Experts
• All Covered
(interview with
former director
of IT for GSB)
• Stealth cloud
startup
• Pulse
• Mkt research
startup
• Greplin
• Xambala
• Zynga
• Addepar
• VMWare
• Technology
consultant to
telecoms
Testing value proposition hypotheses:
Lessons Learned
Hypothesis
Findings
Sell-side
Service
providers
•Additional marginal
revenue at negligible
cost (mostly additional
customer service cost)
•TBD- requires further interviews
Sell-side
Enterprises
•Lower IT cost – spot
market
•FS- unlikely sellers due to security
concerns
•Telecom good target; want revenue
from excess capacity, distributed
compute
Buy-side
•Reduced cloud compute •Not high priority for all (some do
infrastructure cost
value, but tradeoffs important)
Buy-side
•Increased procurement
flexibility
•Somewhat interested; Amazon
generally default.
•Looking for value-added services
that simplify activities
•Most value for small- mid-sized
Major challenges
If seller is private cloud, potential
security concerns
 For startup buyers, Amazon = Trust
 Latency concerns
 High switching costs

Current thoughts on value prop
Seller value
proposition
• Revenue
• Qualified lead-gen
• Demand aggregator
for public cloud;
• Turnkey solution for
selling excess
capacity
Buyer value
proposition
• Value-add services
• Easy buying: enable
buyer to purchase the
right product from the
right provider
• Cost savings
• Breaking from vendor
lock-in
Questions going forward






How do we get past Amazon as the
default?
How viable is telecom as potential seller?
Validate buyer & seller value propositions
How do we access the buyers and sellers?
What sort of sales structure and sales force
does it require?
Who is the main buyer and what are his
motivations?
Is buying guide/ matching service superior
value proposition to marketplace?