«There’s the cloud, then there’s your cloud.»
So goes a tagline from SingleHop, which provides public and private cloud services, dedicated servers, and managed hosting to customers throughout the world. As enterprise IT organizations increasingly recognize the flexibility and agility inherent to services offered by cloud computing providers for their clouds, we can expect the market for such services to continue to grow and competition to continue to heat up. In that context, we asked a few questions of SingleHop EVP Mark Cravotta: Cloud Computing Journal: There’s been a lot of talk recently of the merging of PaaS and IaaS. Where do you stand in this discussion?
Mark Cravotta: SingleHop is focused on delivering IaaS solutions via our bare metal, public cloud and private cloud platforms, coupled with managed services and security services. Our focus is on the Enterprise production systems versus development platforms. The PaaS market is evolving and we will continue to look at strategies as options solidify.
CCJ: You have some fairly serious competitors in your space, and one of them is now owned by one of the largest technology companies in the world. How do you differentiate and win in your marketplace?
Mark: We differentiate by delivering well architected, customer IaaS solutions coupled with high touch services and support, what we call our Service Beyond Support Model. In the end our solutions address specific business needs and are not pre-packaged, are delivered rapidly which enables business agility and are priced competitively based on our underlying cost model being lower than the world’s largest technology companies. We partner with our customers and are flexible and transparent at all points in the relationship. This is also hard to do as companies get larger.
CCJ: On that same note, how fast do you see the need for IaaS growing in the next few years? And do you break it down by regions? For example, Southeast Asia is very dynamic, and all regions of Africa are getting some technology and economic traction these days as well.
Mark: IaaS is constantly growing and that demand will continue to grow consistently. We see demand on six continents. Each market has its own drivers—economic, proximity, global, etc.—based on its sophistication in the global market. We serve customers in 124 countries today.
CCJ: You received a funding round of $14.8 million a few months ago. What gives investors confidence in SingleHop, and how do you apply those investments for your customers?
Mark: We are constantly evaluating and deploying the latest technologies designed to enable our customers to solve their business challenges. This includes expansion into new markets, data center improvements, platform evolution, and network expansion in both capacity and throughput. We also invest heavily in our employees, who make the difference with our customers every day.