Archived Posts

This week I spent some time discussing our strategy with several analysts – really in-depth conversations on how Carpathia has a different strategy when it comes to “cloud” vs. many of our competitors. While different to our competitors, our cloud strategy builds on our core competency of running IT infrastructure. Where we differ is we do not see managed and cloud as mutually exclusive - in fact, it’s just the opposite - two living in harmony within the same customer solution.

Let’s start with what you plan to use the cloud for. Let’s assume you have some degree of predictability in the workloads of your IT infrastructure. Very few enterprise or federal customers can “switch the lights off” at night time on their infrastructure; email doesn’t stop and databases are still used to build reports. Also very few enterprise apps like to scale (both in terms of technology and license model) in fractions of a machine. So this means enterprises have a natural “commit” level that matches their workloads.

At Carpathia Hosting, we are starting to see something very interesting happen. Organizations not only want to share data but in some cases, also share computing resources. This is driving a very interesting cloud formation - semi-private clouds. In this model, the organizations share not just data but compute resources to process the data or solve parts of a complex B2B problem. This approach takes out several of the problems of the previous generation extranets and makes the data a whole lot more interesting when you can directly interact with it.