Dean Roddey
Senior Member
San Francisco based company Cloudy Horizons unveiled today its new flagship product, Hyper-Cloud. Touted by many as a guaranteed paradigm changer, Hyper-Cloud is a product far out in front of the cloud-based services wave. Capitalized by a Who's Who of the venture capital elite, Cloudy Horizons has been working for the last two years to bring its version 1.0 product to market.
CEO Brian Thomas, in an exclusive interview with CloudWave magazine, discussed the rationale behind a product like Hyper-Cloud: "As cloud based services proliferate, we believe that keeping track of all of your cloud connections will become more and more difficult. Hyper-Cloud addresses this issue. Hyper-Cloud provides a single entry point to the cloud, simplifying and streamlining the customer's cloud oriented activities." Thomas explained that their preliminary research, the results of which underlies their extensive access to venture capital, indicated that consumers don't understand that there is more than one cloud, and are confused by dealing with multiple cloud-based vendors.
Hyper-Cloud's business model is that Cloudy Horizons will act as an aggregator of cloud based services, presenting them to the user as available options, and providing an easy configuration utility to set them up. Customers will pay Cloudy Horizons the fees that they would have otherwise paid directly to the individual cloud-based service providers. Cloudy Horizons will use its sizeable customer base to negotiate 'wholesale' access to these individual services, and pocket the difference in cost.
All user communications will go through Cloudy Horizon's cloud servers, allowing them to monitor the status of all services and user activity on those services. Asked if there were any potential privacy issues with this sort of arrangement, for instance might Cloudy Horizon's sell information about customer usage of specific services and so forth, Thomas replied, "Customers needn't worry about their personal information and access data. Cloudy Horizons believes strongly in customer privacy as it pertains to non-revenue oriented concerns."
Asked if there was the eventual possibility of hyper-hyper-cloud type services becoming available at some point down the line, Thomas indicated that Cloudy Horizons has been working closely with law makers, none of whom (he is quick to point out) have any provable investment in Cloudy Horizons per se, to set national policy on the matter of cloud aggregation. Thomas feels, and he assures us that the lawmakers they are working with agree, that hyper-hyper-cloud aggregation services are not in the best interests of the consumer, and should be disallowed by law.
Thomas' leadership in this new industry is further cemented by a thick portfolio of cloud oriented patents. From the use of bytes to store cloud gathered data, to the use of text in cloud based configuration interfaces, to their much touted 'liability reduction' technology patents designed to deflect blame for service disruption to the individual cloud vendors being aggregated, Cloudy Horizons is well positioned to dominate the new frontier of cloud service aggregation.
Buzz in the industry has been high, and individual investors have been fighting for a choice spot in the upcoming Cloudy Horizons public offering. There has been some niggling in the press concerning the over $35M in venture capital that has gone into the salaries of Thomas and his three fellow founders before the product is even debuted, but Thomas dismisses this as attempts by potential competitors to undermine his company's momentum. "Success is not cheap. I and my fellow founders are so confident in the success of this venture that we felt it only prudent to set expectations early. Winners win, and we felt it important to demonstrate that we are already winning."
CEO Brian Thomas, in an exclusive interview with CloudWave magazine, discussed the rationale behind a product like Hyper-Cloud: "As cloud based services proliferate, we believe that keeping track of all of your cloud connections will become more and more difficult. Hyper-Cloud addresses this issue. Hyper-Cloud provides a single entry point to the cloud, simplifying and streamlining the customer's cloud oriented activities." Thomas explained that their preliminary research, the results of which underlies their extensive access to venture capital, indicated that consumers don't understand that there is more than one cloud, and are confused by dealing with multiple cloud-based vendors.
Hyper-Cloud's business model is that Cloudy Horizons will act as an aggregator of cloud based services, presenting them to the user as available options, and providing an easy configuration utility to set them up. Customers will pay Cloudy Horizons the fees that they would have otherwise paid directly to the individual cloud-based service providers. Cloudy Horizons will use its sizeable customer base to negotiate 'wholesale' access to these individual services, and pocket the difference in cost.
All user communications will go through Cloudy Horizon's cloud servers, allowing them to monitor the status of all services and user activity on those services. Asked if there were any potential privacy issues with this sort of arrangement, for instance might Cloudy Horizon's sell information about customer usage of specific services and so forth, Thomas replied, "Customers needn't worry about their personal information and access data. Cloudy Horizons believes strongly in customer privacy as it pertains to non-revenue oriented concerns."
Asked if there was the eventual possibility of hyper-hyper-cloud type services becoming available at some point down the line, Thomas indicated that Cloudy Horizons has been working closely with law makers, none of whom (he is quick to point out) have any provable investment in Cloudy Horizons per se, to set national policy on the matter of cloud aggregation. Thomas feels, and he assures us that the lawmakers they are working with agree, that hyper-hyper-cloud aggregation services are not in the best interests of the consumer, and should be disallowed by law.
Thomas' leadership in this new industry is further cemented by a thick portfolio of cloud oriented patents. From the use of bytes to store cloud gathered data, to the use of text in cloud based configuration interfaces, to their much touted 'liability reduction' technology patents designed to deflect blame for service disruption to the individual cloud vendors being aggregated, Cloudy Horizons is well positioned to dominate the new frontier of cloud service aggregation.
Buzz in the industry has been high, and individual investors have been fighting for a choice spot in the upcoming Cloudy Horizons public offering. There has been some niggling in the press concerning the over $35M in venture capital that has gone into the salaries of Thomas and his three fellow founders before the product is even debuted, but Thomas dismisses this as attempts by potential competitors to undermine his company's momentum. "Success is not cheap. I and my fellow founders are so confident in the success of this venture that we felt it only prudent to set expectations early. Winners win, and we felt it important to demonstrate that we are already winning."
