The advantage for ProfitBricks is that they will be presenting themselves the opportunity to find the next twitter/facebook/pinterest/dropbox by focusing on this community which will help them gain market share and become a player in this space.

The interesting thing is in these discussions no one talks about all of the companies that are trying to get off of AWS not onto another cloud, but onto their own infrastructure. Once companies find themselves at a scale north of a few thousand servers the cost/operational benefits seize and it is actually more cost-effective to consider building out your own private infrastructure. This is especially important if the core of your business is delivering a web-based service as your competitive advantage and profitability over time will be dependent on lowering TCO as much as possible.

- Scale (as Ed mentioned above)
AWS seems to be in the lead of a small set of providers that are able to pretty much supply any amount of infrastructure, instantly – and with no long term commitments. Pretty much any other provider out there would require setup fee’s, long term commitments and days/weeks to deliver +100 servers.
It’s hard for, even the larger, competitors to compete on scale.

- Geographical reach
AWS seems to light up a new location every quarter, and maintain a common set of API’s across them.
The investment needed to do that is simply to steep for most of the other guys out there.

- And finally, Product Breadth
AWS used to be nothing but a glorified old school VPS server, but in the last 3 years they’ve rolled out an amazing product set, and new features seems to keep on coming from their army of developers. Again, most ‘old-school’ providers just can not afford this level of R&D.

From our perspective, that’s why this ‘bookshop’ has taken over what is probably the largest commercial opportunity in the history of the service provider industry.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that ProfitBricks are able to compete significantly on any of those 3 points…on their own.

At OnApp we’ve tied together our clients (they are all service providers competing with AWS) and build a federation that allows our clients to deploy services across each others infrastructure. It’s all real time and api’d – We call it OnApp connect.

We’ve got around 2000 service provider deployments, and across those there are more (or sufficient) Scale, Geographical Reach and Product Breadth than AWS would ever be able to deliver.

We think federating is the only way to combat the AWS threat – and if service providers ignore this threat and try to go head to head with AWS on their own, they’ve already lost – and we’d be looking back at these years where the long tail of the service provider industry would disappear…

:)
Ditlev

Amazon is the only IaaS of note right now because of their physical scale. IaaS is like manufacturing – scale wins. I’m sure in time HP, IBM etc will have a viable alternative … but I think the money for everyone else is in added value services (like the massive global SI and VAR community have done on top fo Dell/HP/IBM for 20 years instead of building their own hardware to compete), not in trying to compete based on selling access to infrastructure. It’s a dollars game no one without billion-dollar-deep pockets can win.

* Development Team: The development team has saved days in server management. And the time saved in technical server conversation is even more. We no longer have intense meetings to discuss server configuration. With Profit Bricks Datacenter Designer, the conversation between other teams is visual. Something we did not get with our prior hosting provider.

* Operations Team: The operations team has the flexibility to work from home, road, and mobile. We live in New England, there are times we don’t want our employees in the bad weather. With profit Bricks, the ability for our workforce to have all their tools, everywhere they are is a return you just can’t measure. Morale is high and our team works better.

* Business Team: The business team has been able to reduce costs by nearly two-thirds under Profit Bricks pricing model. And when we can reduce our overhead by that much, our clients benefit from our ability to deliver great technology tools at prices competitors can’t match. Our clients appreciate knowing that we work on our own technology to better serve the