Ejasent goes head-to-head with outsourcers
AS CTO AND founder of Ejasent, Rajeev Bharadhwaj envisions a new paradigm of computing based on a utility model in which customers only pay for what they use.
In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Bharadhwaj explains why computing utilities are inevitable and how his start-up company will compete, beginning in February after completing eight pilot programs, with rivals such as Loudcloud, LogicTier, Mimecom, and a host of traditional outsourcing companies.
InfoWorld: What makes you think that computing utilities are the next big thing?
Bharadhwaj: We think that over a period of time everything is going to be bought in bulk and sold in pieces. This has been true for the traditional utilities, such as water and electricity. It is now true for bandwidth, it is true for content, and the last and final thing that it will be true for is applications.
People are evaluating the model right now for content and bandwidth, but that is the least expensive thing to buy in terms of the total amount of money people spend. The amount of money people spend on bandwidth and content is substantially less than what they're willing to spend on applications. But it's very difficult to do applications as a utility. It's a long and hard process, and a good portion of our company's life has been spent on building infrastructure to provide that.
InfoWorld: Among potential customers, where do you see the most resistance to your approach?
Bharadhwaj: Today, the people whom we find are initially resistant are the Web operations people. The issue is not owning the equipment or the data; it's just that they feel they can't control the execution of things.
But this is where we have an extremely good value proposition. We actually provide huge amounts of control to the customer. You can get all the monitoring you want and you can make all the changes you want on policies and decide where you want to place things. Whatever changes you want to make to your application, you're free to do it because it's just going to get propagated on our network.
We're saying that we give you the response time that you want at the price that you want to pay, and you get the same response time regardless of your data load or geographic location. We say that you're able to control your costs without having to do capacity planning or incurring big outlays of capital.
InfoWorld: People have been talking about shared infrastructure for years. First we had time-sharing, and today we have ASPs [application service providers]. How far along are we in terms of creating a true utility model?
Bharadhwaj: It's basically
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