In-Depth

Making a Cloud Play

Wayne Beekman is maneuvering his business to catch the cloud. Should you be doing that too?

• By Scott Bekker
• October 01, 2009

When it comes to cloud computing, Wayne Beekman is ahead of the curve.

Beekman is principal at Information Concepts Inc., a custom-solution development shop based near Washington, D.C., in Herndon, Va. In a time when most established partners are eyeing cloud computing warily -- and from a distance -- Beekman has gotten up close to the cloud-computing offerings from all three major vendors: Google Inc. with the Google App Engine; Amazon.com Inc. with its EC2 and other platforms; and Microsoft with its Azure platform, which is set to launch in November.

While he's taken an agnostic approach in his evaluations and recommendations to customers, his perspective is uniquely informed by his Microsoft experience. Information Concepts was founded in 1982 and has been a Gold Certified Partner since Microsoft created the role in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, Beekman has participated as a member of the .NET Partner Advisory Committee since 1999. In September, Redmond Channel Partner's Scott Bekker got on the phone with Beekman to talk about his experience setting up a cloud-computing practice a year ago. He also got Beekman's perspective on how cloud computing will play out across the industry as Azure goes live commercially and as the concepts of cloud computing become more mainstream.

How did you get interested in cloud computing?
A year and a half ago, I saw an ex-Microsoft employee blog post that said, 'Hey, look what Google's doing.' It was the announcement of the Google App Engine. So I sat there for an hour looking at their videos. I was just fascinated by the concept -- to not have to provision or procure any hardware and have it instantly accessible without having to deploy.

Google was having a show in San Francisco. There were 4,000 attendees -- it was sold out. There was a vibe in the room. [Before that], I thought, these are just some developers from some startups. But as I walked around the room, I saw a number of Fortune 500 name badges.

I came back, and I immediately hired a woman to go out and talk to all of our existing commercial customers. That was a year and a half ago.

What's happened since then?
A year and a half later, I've gotten better meetings at higher levels in organizations than I ever had since I started the company in 1982. Traditionally we'd meet with a director of an application development group. Our meetings over the last year have been more at the CIO level or the CFO level.

In the first year of this, I felt like I was doing a lot of education. I came up with the stacks [a set of diagrams], which helped people visualize what I was talking about. I was able to talk about specific requirements based on the stacks. Basically, I had to build my own tools. That was year No. 1, and we've got a little business around that.

In the last few months, I've had more meetings where executives at organizations are saying, 'I'm committed to moving my stuff to the cloud. I understand it.'

They understand the difference between infrastructure as a service and development as a service. Right now, I'd say they're more interested in infrastructure as a service.

How have the customer questions and objections changed?
What I've heard in the last couple of months are a different set of objections. Originally, if you asked what customers' top 10 questions were, the top three were security, security and security. The next three were SLA [service level agreement], SLA and SLA. The other four were just that they didn't understand it. They also asked, 'How do I know this is going to be around?'

Now the questions are much more sophisticated. One CIO said, 'I'm committed to this, but I already have hardware that I'm paying depreciation costs on.' Another CIO said, 'I'm committed to doing this. The problem is, how do I start? I have a purchase order for a new piece of hardware. I have to rebuild my operational procedures. I've got to get there. I'm just not sure how I get over these organizational hurdles to get there.'

On the other hand, I had a session with an organization, and, after an hour and a half of understanding what we were talking about, they actually identified a server in a cage on the west coast that had to be offsite. They could actually shut down the server and save $10,000. At the end of the meeting, one of them says, 'Oh yeah, I'll sign on to Amazon tonight and take care of that.'

So you've saved a customer $10,000. What's in it for you?
[Laughs]. Well, that's the tricky part. You can probably cherry-pick a couple of things to establish yourself as a trusted advisor. The bottom line is that as solutions providers, .NET isn't new. There's a lot of competence in .NET development shops. One of the reasons we're investing in our cloud-computing practice is that it provides a different way to bring value to our customers. We're going to architect the solution differently for you, which is going to save you a ton of money. We're coming up to almost 10 years of .NET. Sure, you can be a great SharePoint provider, but at some point, services become commoditized.

Historically speaking, we're primarily on the development side. We always work with the operational groups to make sure that what we build [can get implemented and supported]. If it's a small customer, we're doing everything. I've had more discussions lately on the infrastructure side, especially with Amazon Web Services.

The value proposition that I'm focusing on is in the area of disaster recovery. We bring value to traditional infrastructure folks that we traditionally didn't bring value to. As a side note, Amazon Web Services just announced their partner program, and we were put in as one of their solution providers. Disaster-recovery scenarios are one of the things that Amazon is emphasizing.