Whispers in the clouds

What challenges do you face for your regional strategy for delivering regional cloud services?

Gartner has said that they are certain that there are certain parts of cloud computing, that are hype and there are other parts that are not. Software-as-a-Service (Saas) has been out for a long time, so you have to consider the customer. The customer we are targeting are small to medium clients, 150 employees – so if I was a start up company, we would probably want to focus on our core, and make sure we were agile to compete with larger companies.

Start-ups are very price sensitive and CAPEX is an issue, and they also need to make sure that they are able to access a rapid, mobile solution set, with on-boarding process comes as done. Those are the four things that we found [that matter to SMBs], I used to handle 4 million small business users when I was at Yahoo.

So in general when it comes to SMBs, what they want from a value added software-as-a-service is, they don’t want that IT growing pains, they don’t have to worry about running out of datacentre space, or datacentre power, or having to replace their servers as they are getting older, software needing to be upgraded, having to hire more people and so on.

They simply want software on the net, on a low cost, subscription basis. When you get at the core of what they need, they need e-mail, they need a website, they need payroll, they need to invoice clients, so there is a core set of fundamental things that small businesses need in order to get started, they are less fickle than consumers, consumers change a lot, and with businesses, what is nice is they are sticky. If they bought e-mail, and then Sharepoint, they are more likely to buy the family.

They are less likely to be concerned about security, and if there is a powerful brand behind it, they are even less likely to be concerned. A small-to-medium company, is less likely to be concerned than a big bank. So uptake will happen, but there are more important things that they are worried about, like survival.

We are spending time, not just with our big commercial clients, those are the anchor clients, but we also want to go after the GCC, we want to go after the small-to-medium enterprise in the GCC. Once you have SaaS, you are immediately in the GCC, I don’t have to have a trade licence in Dubai or an office there to offer SaaS, or hire direct sales people. That is the beauty of the model.

What is the main selling point for your services?

For cloud services, the main advantage is no IT headaches, it gives the company the ability to focus on the core, there are no IT growing pains, there is no CAPEX – it is a monthly fee – it is completely scalable, and for some clients, the cloud is in the region, it is not in the US, there is no Patriot Act [to require disclosure of data]. Part of our strategy is that we are building two additional datacentres in Qatar, and then we will build additional datacentres that are close to the Gulf Bridge International cable, (GBI) to leverage that transport as a service. We can benefit from lower bandwidth costs if we leverage that infrastructure as a service.

At the moment there are very few rules on things like data discovery and compliance for companies operating in the region, but it could happen – how will you tackle that if it comes to pass?

As the countries get more sophisticated, as they grow and mature, there are going to be rules and regulations, I would be shocked if there wasn’t. So part of this is a lot of regulations come from central banks; central banks vary country by country, so of course we have to be cognisant of any types of rules. We are finding some interest from banks in Bahrain that are interested in accessing out-of-country, but in-region disaster recovery, to leverage the assets that we have here. But of course, [legislation] is going to happen, we can’t predict what flavour, but it will happen, and we have to abide by those rules.