INDIAN WELLS, CALIF. (02/08/2000) - The explosion in data, related specifically to the additional customer information captured by electronic commerce sites, is driving a number of solutions unveiled here at Demo 2000 this week.
The promise from all the current solutions providers is becoming a same-sounding mantra that goes something like 'users can concentrate on their core business while someone else worries about managing the infrastructure.'
Hosting services also offer service level agreements (SLAs) that promise a site will not crash under extraordinary heavy loads.
Loudcloud Inc., founded in September last year by Marc Andreessen, Netscape Communications Corp. co-founder, and funded to the tune of US$68 million by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. and Benchmark Capital, is promising to "collapse time to market by 2.5 times" for startups, said Andreessen.
Loudcloud will provide dot-coms with a one-stop shop for Internet infrastructure, said Andreessen. In essence, Loudcloud is a system integrator/e-commerce hosting service that will design, set up and run a site using its systems from servers, and storage to application management.
Acteva Inc., an events management dot-com, is one of the first to use Loudcloud to host its site.
"The worst part about building infrastructure is you don't get paid. Nobody sees the value of it until it crashes," said Acteva Chief Executive Officer Lu Cordova.
According to Cordova, costing out the difference between building its own infrastructure and having it hosted comes out in favor of a hosted environment, as well as allowing Acteva to focus on what it does best -- events management transactions for its customers such as the Harvard Alumni Association.
Although Cordova said the company never believed building its own infrastructure was a solution, the former data center it used was not equipped to handle Acteva's volume of business.
Loudcloud migrated Acteva from using Cold Fusion on a Windows NT platform to running an Oracle environment on a Sun Solaris platform, and according to Cordova, Acteva's downtime problems were dramatically reversed.
"The real power behind Andreessen's company is his team," said Cordova.
She warned that Loudcloud and other hosting services also face a challenge when offering a SLA. Cordova said she was unimpressed with the current state of SLAs.
"Most SLAs say that if your system goes down, you don't have to pay for the service for the time it was down," she said.
Not paying for the service becomes a minor detail if a site is down, she added.
"The onus is on Loudcloud," Cordova said, to do better than that.
Loudcloud does not appear ready to build its own data centers, and in turn is partnering with both Exodus and Global Networking, two large database hosting services.
Viathan Corp. is also addressing the problem of a huge growth in non-relational data gathered on e-commerce Web sites. The company also claims it will allow companies to concentrate on their core business by automating or eliminating the need to re-architect relational databases as data increases.
Rather than throwing more iron as a storage solution to handling a huge amount of streaming data that comes across a site from clickthroughs, customer history and e-mails, Viathan's back-end application will repartition storage as more servers are added to the system.
The Viathan solution will be marketed both as a hosted application as well as an application that can be installed at a user's own site and will be available in beta this spring and ship this summer.
Loudcloud Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, can be reached at http://www.loudcloud.com/. Viathan Corp., in Seattle, Washington, can be reached at http://www.viathan.com/.