I moved to enterprise software at a later stage in my life. These types of services could also accelerate the much-needed transformation of local and state government IT operations, the age and clunkiness of which were badly exposed by the pandemic.Īnd if Oracle and IBM were smart, they'd give up trying to chase enormous government and Fortune 500 contracts and rebrand themselves as cloud infrastructure services for the rest of the world.įive questions for Ofer Bengal, CEO at Redisĭesigning airplane modifications and installations as an aerospace engineer.Expect to see more talented people who earned their stripes inside big cloud companies spreading the wealth to smaller, more customer-focused companies (likely while generating their own wealth).DigitalOcean, arguably a pioneer of the latter-day small-business cloud, just hired Gabe Monroy of Microsoft Azure to be its first chief product officer, giving the newly public company Big Cloud experience for its nimbler operation.This will create a huge opportunity for companies that provide simpler, cheaper and helpful cloud services allowing businesses of all sizes to thrive. So what does this future look like? As we explored earlier this year, the next wave of enterprise tech companies will compete on the basis of the developer experience they provide. And while big companies can manage the increasing complexity of major cloud services to get the functionality they need, smaller businesses are often overwhelmed by it and struggle to hire the right talent to make sense of it. But even though AWS owes much of its success to startups that grew on the back of its services, cloud providers have gotten so big in the last five years that it's easy for customers who don't rank among the top accounts to feel lost, especially when they need help.Cloud computing faced two major challenges in its early days: convincing Big Business that it was safe and reliable, while building as many computing options for applications as businesses could spin up for themselves on their own equipment.But they both realize that catering to smaller companies represents a potential new era in the history of the cloud. Neither Backblaze nor Cloudflare are in a position to challenge industry leaders like AWS, Microsoft and Google any time soon for the breadth and depth of cloud infrastructure business. It has since layered on serverless computing services that could be an interesting place to run applications as edge computing starts to become a real-world strategy, and last month launched its own low-cost, S3-compatible cloud storage service.Īnd there is an emerging gap in the market here.Cloudflare was much bigger than Backblaze at the time of its 2019 IPO, but built its reputation in similar fashion around the needs of small businesses and individual developers.In some ways, it represents a younger, smaller version of Cloudflare, which started out with relatively simple security and site-reliability services and now harbors ambitions of becoming "the fourth major cloud provider," as CEO Matthew Prince recently told Protocol. But the company has gotten to this point on just $3 million in funding its IPO could deliver up to $100 million in new funding, which would go a long way toward building out its technology portfolio and customer-support operation.īackblaze's story should sound familiar.Backblaze is not exactly an enterprise cloud juggernaut: It recorded $53.8 million in revenue last year, only $14.2 million of which came from its B2 service.It also offers a backup and recovery service for businesses, which has never been more important in the age of ransomware attacks.Backblaze's object storage service is called B2, and its primary selling point is cost: B2 is significantly cheaper than S3 and the similar options available from Microsoft and Google Cloud.The company offers cloud storage that is compatible with AWS' popular S3 storage service, which most anyone who has built a cloud application over the last decade has probably worked with once or twice. But reliable options for smaller companies, which don't want to get lost alongside megacorporations at the big providers, are starting to get serious traction.īackblaze filed for an initial public offering this week, joining the ranks of dozens of cloud-based enterprise tech companies that have joined the public markets over the last couple of years. providers for a relatively long period of time, which made sense as the business world became comfortable with the concept. Cloud infrastructure has been dominated by the Big Three U.S.
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