Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

Robin Harris just made a post about cloud storage as a service that was both insightful and right in line with some of my thinking about cloud infrastructure.

A car wash, haircut or a Google search is a service. You show up in your car, with your hair or a browser and a complete transaction occurs. A job completes.

…

The number of similar cloud services on the market suggests the wrong question is being answered. While there is a market for raw cloud storage – as Amazon’s S3 has shown – the real opportunity is incorporating it as a component – in a solution to a business problem.

I’m a big fan of companies who are leveraging cloud technology and economics to develop business-focused solutions that solve specific problems.

Although its certainly interesting for IT shops to be able to leverage a cloud infrastructure to scale servers on demand or access a theoretically infinite pool of storage, its more interesting and valuable to tie these cloud components together to solve business challenges like disaster recovery (for example).  Cloud components are ultimately going to become a commodity so I think if you’re planning to play in this space, play higher in the stack and use the components to build a solution that will get business stakeholders (versus IT stakeholders) excited to open their wallets.

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It’s refreshing to see a company take ownership of my recent customer service issues the way Zipcar just did:

Hi John,

Zipcar understands that when it comes to your transportation, you have choices.  Likewise, we thank you for choosing Zipcar.  More importantly, per your member feedback, we are concerned with your unsatisfactory experiences with Zipcar. Please know that we understand the impact that it imposes on your choice of Zipcar and how it can dictate how viable our service is as your alternative mode of transportation.    I reviewed your account and the incidents that you reported have been noted and are being addressed.  Your feedback is greatly appreciated as we are only as good as our members’ communication.  Likewise, we make every effort to hold irresponsible members accountable for misbehavior and inconveniencing others.  However, there are times of unforeseen incidents due to extenuating circumstances and your understanding and graciousness are greatly appreciated.  Our goal is to make the best possible resolutions in those unfortunate circumstances.  Likewise, Zipcar strives to provide a great service and we are constantly looking for ways to improve.

We do apologize for any inconveniences and do take these accounts seriously.  We hope that you will give Zipcar further opportunities to better your future experiences.   With that in mind, please accept $100 in driving credit to accommodate those future reservations.  It has already been posted to your account and is good until 2/21/09.

Please know that I emailed you in consideration of not imposing on your schedule.  Also, I have attached for your reference Zipcar for business rates.  I noticed that you have utilized Zipcar during the week and thought this would be beneficial to you because it extends better rates in all of our markets.

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