Business IT Buzz Blog

What follows is my podcast with Kevin Epstein, VP of Marketing at CloudShare (formerly IT Structures).

Epstein offered details on the rebranding as CloudShare (see press release here), the company's new cloud/SaaS platform, and the following points:

• How the new cloud/SaaS platform is unique from other offerings
• What's the value to salespeople using the platform
• Why virtual sales engagement tools are becoming important in today's economy
• How software vendors are feeling about the shift towards cloud computing, virtual machines, on-demand, SaaS, etc.
• Cloud computing's implications on IT

Listen to or download the 7:51 podcast below:

Download file

------TRANSCRIPT------

Can you give me a brief background of IT Structures and why you've decided to rebrand as CloudShare?

Absolutely. We were started as in 2007 as IT Structures by a few experts in security and networking with our research and development based in Israel but our company headquarters here in Menlo Park, California in the United States. We're back by Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital and recently Charles River and we've released our product to a select set of customers slightly over a year ago and we chose to rebrand as CloudShare for two reasons. First of all, we're finally exiting stealth mode so we wanted a more recognizable name. Secondly, we felt that the specific name CloudShare reflects really what we do. We're a business oriented offering for sales demos, proofs of concept and training, hence, the sharing part, all of which is based on cloud computing technology.

You just made an announcement this week besides the rebranding -- can you tell me about that announcement?

We're announcing three things. The first is our launch as CloudShare with some marquee customers like VMware, SAP, Cisco, Websense, and more. And over one million virtual machine demo, proof of concept, and training hours already served. So I guess we're a bit unusual for a startup. The second thing we're announcing is our integration with SalesForce.com. There's now a CloudShare plug-in available on the SalesForce AppExchange. And lastly, we're announcing that we have received our "B" round of funding that's $10 million lead by Charles River Ventures, with Sequoia Capital and Gemini also continuing to participate.

You recently announced a new cloud SaaS platform. What makes it unique from other cloud SaaS offerings?

Our CloudShare platform brings to sales demos, proofs of concept and training what SalesForce.com brought to CRM or WebEx brought to PowerPoint. In other words, using the CloudShare platform, you can from a web-based console issue full independent dedicated mini data center environments to end users and then monitor all of these environments from a backend dashboard. So for example, imagine you were a sales engineer and you've just finished showing a web presentation to a perspective customer and your perspective customer says well, that looks wonderful. I want to try it.

Without CloudShare and the current bad old days, you as the sales engineer would then need to negotiate a time with your perspective customer to come onsite, and then buy the plane tickets to get there, get through the baggage fees and security checks, hopefully, get onsite in the customer's datacenter, through their security, through their networking people. It's an enormously long and expensive process and thus you tend to lose perspective customers. If you have someone and they're excited, they want to try it now.

With CloudShare, with our product, you can in fact issue someone that multi-week, proof of concept while you were still on the phone with that perspective customer, in real-time, in a couple of seconds and it would perfectly the first time.

So what's the value for salespeople using this platform?

The platform is all about leverage and customer experience. As a sales representative, I want to be able to give as many prospects a super compelling hands-on experience with my product as possible. And if you go onsite, that's really not the way to have that leveraged high quality, high volume experience. It takes too much time and frankly isn't always compelling. CloudShare caters to the customer's need for instant gratification and at the same time gives the sales representative the ability to handle more perspective customers. And of course, CloudShare costs much, much less than going onsite and is much less hassle.

Speaking of saving costs, why would you say virtual sales engagement tools are becoming important in today's economy?

It's interesting. We're seeing a sort of dynamic conflict between company needs and customer needs. On the one side in this environment, companies don't want to spend a lot of money so they tend to be reluctant to send sales engineers onsite, it that it ties up the sales engineers for a while and costs a lot. At the same time on the customer side, if you're a customer in this economic climate, you want to try something before you buy it; you want to get hands-on. So the error of sort of the golf and sales deal is done and customers hate having to jump through hoops just to get an engineer onsite to try something. After all, they're the ones with the cash.

So CloudShare and similar virtual tools like SalesForce and WebEx, I think, well serve both the company side and the customer side. These types of tools reduce the friction. They lower costs to interact with customers while catering to that hands-on instant gratification need of the customers. I'd say that overall, we think it's a win-win scenario. We really encourage anyone, prospect sales, or otherwise to try it for yourself at www.CloudShare.com. Come take it for a spin and see what we mean.

In your opinion how are software vendors feeling about this big shift towards cloud computing, virtual machines, On-Demand, SaaS and so on? Are they welcoming, are they skeptical or worried? What do you think?

Its interesting. Like any major evolutionary shift, there are always going to be folks who view it as an opportunity and then folks who hang back and view this as a challenge for their business. One of the nice things about CloudShare is that we assist both sides. Much like the MWare did with virtual machines, we provide the folks who are comfortable with the existing physical world an environment that looks just like their existing physical world, like their existing data center.

At the same time, we do offer them that Software-as-a-Service approach. We let them pick-up their existing environment and offer it as SaaS to their end users and thus gain all of the flexibility of cloud and SaaS and so forth, that instant backup, instant access from anywhere in the world, on-demand, flexibility. The truth is that even as software evolves, enterprises will continue to face the how do I get a complete environment of all of these different parts right now challenge. So we're well positioned to provide long-term value.

What implications do you think cloud computing will have on IT?

Again, it's all about having a responsiveness and availability mentality. If viewed positively, cloud computing lets IT move faster, respond faster and provide greater availability to a wider base of users than ever before. Less time is spent on the logistics of shipping machines and more time on the higher value activities of architecting great systems for end users. So at the risk of going outside of IT, as Martha Stewart might say, it's a good thing.