What Happened to the Cloud Computing Class of 2008
This particular blog is a little different than what we would normally post. You see, in 2008, Sonian was a top 7 finalist in Amazon’s AWS Start-Up Challenge. This competition was designed for start-ups to get themselves heard and noticed, and win up to $100,000 in cash and AWS credits.
As it has been a few years since, Sonian would like to see what each finalist has been up to. Where is the company now, what have they been doing, and what were some of the obstacles or triumphs they overcame?
We’ve contacted each finalist and will begin to post their responses as they filter in. To begin, we have provided you with the letter to which we distributed to each finalist. Also, Sonian has started the blog series by sharing what we’ve been doing for the past three years…
Dear <2008 AWS Start-Up Challenge Company>,
In 2008 your company and my company Sonian were in a distinguished group of 7 pioneering cloud-computing vendors selected from thousands of entrants to compete for the AWS Start-Up Challenge grand prize.
Sonian is now curious to learn how your business is doing 3 years later. We would like to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you to discuss your AWS experience, what you learned, what you would have done the same or differently, and what you’re doing now!
Here, to ease the pressure, we’ll go first.
Sonian - the name of the company is in homage to the nations preeminent archival repository: The Smithsonian Institution.
In 2007, Greg Arnette founded Sonian and began a “journey to the cloud.” The premise was simple: use cloud computing infrastructure as an enterprise-class electronic information archive repository. The technology challenge was immense but surmountable. Using “the cloud” for business-class needs would require new ways of thinking about software architectures, design patterns, and new systems administration processes would need to be conceived to operate a software-as-a-service system at cloud-scale.
Four years ago, businesses, government agencies, schools and hospitals were all suffering from overburdened storage systems and rising costs. If cloud computing could be harnessed effectively, a business could save 50 to 80 percent on their Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage costs.
The reason the cloud was so appealing in 2007 (and continues to be appealing today) is two-fold: economics and reliability. Efficiently utilizing the cloud to solve enterprise IT pain points was a worthy mission to start a company. It took another two years before the venture community would see the cloud as “a positive,” and the financial collapse in September 2008 accelerated cloud adoption, because companies across the world implemented budget austerity programs.
Amazon Web Services was the first credible “cloud infrastructure” to attract wide adoption. Sun Microsystems and others had tried “cloud-like” systems before, but the economics didn’t work for a start-up. For example, Sun was charging one dollar per CPU hour, while Amazon was at 10 cents per hour. The same with storage, Sun was one dollar per gigabyte per month, while Amazon was at 15 cents.
In order to attract attention to their nascent cloud services, Amazon launched “Start-Up Challenges.” The winner would receive $50,000 cash prize as well as Amazon usage credits. Amazon was prescient to focus on start-up companies at first. Enterprises were not ready to make big cloud migrations, but start-ups had existing infrastructure investments, and we’re already in the mindset to take a risk. Sonian entered the Challenge in 2008, and was a Top 7 Finalist. Here is how Sonian has prospered since then.
Since 2008 Start-Up Challenge, Sonian has grown nicely and matured from an early-stage company to growth stage. In August 2009 Sonian raised seven million dollars in a Series “A” venture financing, and in December 2010 added an additional nine million to the coffers with a “B” round.
Sonian is managing an impressive amount of data on the Amazon cloud. As of this writing (August 2011) Sonian is storing nearly 4 billion objects on S3 and EBS. Sonian utilizes on average 500 compute nodes per month and is pioneering many “big data and search” technologies to store information at the lowest costs.
Sonian’s engineering group is a new kind of distributed model leveraging the best of both on-premises and remote personnel. The key to our success with this hybrid model is great team leadership, an agile development process, web-based tools and frictionless remote meeting and audio capabilities.
As of today, the company has 60 people, and is headquartered in the Boston area.
Alright, now it’s your turn. We promise not to take much of your time. You can contact us at marketing@sonian.net or call 617-958-4000. All of those who oblige will have their results published in a follow-up blog. Hope you’re all doing well and we’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Your Fellow Classmate,
Sonian
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