In our ongoing series of interviews with players in the cloud computing and Web 2 sector we interview Pavel Bondarchuck of backup service Cloudberry.
What gave you the idea for Cloudberry and how long has it been established?
CloudBerry Lab was established in August 2008 by a group of seasoned software developers. We got excited about the idea of cloud computing and cloud storage in particular. Most of us worked with databases for a long time and were getting bored. It looked like there was basically nothing to invent in relational database world anymore. Cloud Storage turned out to be a significant shift in the way you think about the storage. You don’t have any upfront costs, you pay only for what you use and you don’t have much of an administrative overhead! It looked so promising that we could not resist the temptation to jump onto the band wagon.
How many people work for Cloudberry and how did they come to the company?
Currently we have 15+ people and we have been working as a team in different companies for 5 years. There are a few people with whom I have been working for 9 years.
What has been the biggest challenge so far?
There were a couple of challenges. Our team mostly consists of software engineers and obviously we are struggling with marketing and sales efforts. Pitching our products to popular tech news website like TechCrunch and Mashable is a huge challenge by itself! So far we had mild success with these. Such sites are looking for hot news and often feature projects that have very little application but stand out. Our product helps resolve real problem but the problem might sound boring and not worth so much coverage.
And what challenges do you see for the future?
We have to start monetizing our product business which would mean staying away from what is just cool and focusing on what adds to the bottom line. I think all the future obstacles will be somehow related to that.
Do you have any plans for other services?
We have more ideas that we can physically implement. It is hard to resist the temptation to do something else since there are so many exciting technologies and opportunities around. One such example is our twitter plug-in http://twitter.cloudberrylab.com/
However we want to stay focused on our core products related to cloud storage services and we will certainly extend our offering to support other cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Sun Cloud Storage Service.
What do you think are the major obstacles to getting people and businesses to use web based services?
Trust is certainly one of them, especially trusting your critical data. Not only should a web service be robust and reliable, and keep the data available 24 x 7, it should be secure, allow access only to authorized parties and leave no way to intersect the data in transit.
Cloud Storage vendors will have to spend a lot of time and money educating consumers and forming positive image of cloud services.
What is the biggest incentive to get them to switch to cloud based systems?
At the moment: you don’t have any upfront costs, you don’t have to invest thousands of dollars in your hardware and software before you even start using it. You can start very low and pay for what you use and when your usage grows over time you don’t have to think about upgrading hardware software and investing another thousand dollars in that. You also save on the operation costs because you don’t need IS/DBA staff maintaining your infrastructure.
How do you see web based services in five years time?
In the next five years I think they will only be growing in popularity. More and more established companies will become cloud services vendors and an ecosystem of smaller companies like CloudBerry Lab will grow around them. For small and midsized companies using cloud infrastructure will become a commonplace. Large corporation will be moving more and more of their IT to the cloud and there will be many so-called private clouds in enterprise datacenters.
What happens when someone puts a digger through the cable ?
The answer is very simple – look at Amazon Web Service. Currently they have datacenters in several regions in the US and another one in Europe. Last week they had an outage in one of their four availability zones, yet it barely affected anyone using other datacenters:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/11/lightning-strike-triggers-amazon-ec2-outage/
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