Even Your Grandma Can Run Enterprise IT

So, we announced AppZero on March 3^rd at Demo '09.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the event, give me a minute here.  It's a pretty simple concept:  High-tech companies -- usually fairly small -- launch their company or new products to an audience of VCs and press.  In our case, we did both.

Here's the catch: you get a maximum of 6 minutes to convey your value proposition and demo it at work.  It's amazing how long 6 minutes can be and how fast they can go.  Especially live in front of an equally live audience.

Take a look at the video of our 6 minutes of fame which translated into a gratifying avalanche of recognition and press.

Google "AppZero".  I just did and here's what I got:  Results 1 - 10 of about 40,500 for "AppZero". (0.14 seconds)   Pretty standard looking, right?

Until I remembered that exactly a week ago today, no one had heard of AppZero -- today, we have more than 40 thousand hits.

It's hard to pick a favorite piece of coverage.  Computerworld's Eric Lundquist's choosing AppZero as the best business application at Demo 09 certainly has to be a contender.  PC Magazine and The Next Big Thing gave us a smile as well as Network World.  But it's nice getting noticed by CIO magazine as well.

Hands down, my favorite headline came from Krishnan Subramanian's March 5^th blog on Cloud Ave.  It was:  AppZero - Even Your Grandma Can Run Enterprise IT.

But it could have been so different.

If you watched the video of our six minute demo, you know that we showed the click and drag provisioning of a three-tiered application in a VAA on: first, from our datacenter to Amazon EC2, and secondly, from Amazon EC2 to Go Grid.  So simple and so fast, it really is rocket science.  Great demo.  Great credibility.

Except as Mark Yohai (VP Sales) and Ed Johns  (Sr. Systems Engineer) and I were backstage watching the team before us crash and burn with messed up internet connectivity. Mark gets an email from Amazon just as the moderator calls our company name.  It read....

Subject: Notice: Degraded Amazon EC2 Instance
Hello, We have noticed that one or more of your instances are running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.     i-6b55c102

This was not a good moment.

And I'm picturing the three of us about to sink like the Dow Jones.  But sink we did not.  Just the opposite.  We were a hit at the show, our booth always full.

One week after launch is a good time to look back before we zoom into our future.  Everyone in this company has worked hard to make this product so great and so solid that we now have a very real chance to create a market segment around our idea of virtual application appliances (VAA) - to make a difference.

There are few times in a company's history or in a person's career when the right set of circumstance and change comes together to allow for such a bold beginning or new start as we had last week.  I am not much of a cheerleader, but I and the rest of the leadership team are proud of what we have done as a company. There is much work ahead, but the best part of the journey is just beginning.

AppZero lives here...