A Deluxe Apartment in the Sky

Before you write your service provider a check – me, my competition, anybody – you have to ask them, “How are you going to accelerate my success?” The answer I think you want to look for is about execution. Simple, fast execution.

It doesn’t have to be about doing a lot of things. When I was at Salesforce.com, we had competition from Siebel and MSCRM. They had us on features, hundreds of them. They had us on size, they were multiple times as big as us. We just said “we are easy to use, easy to implement and easy to administer and the browser based app runs fast."

That's what was most important. We won. After all, how is a feature going to make you successful if it’s down and it’s slow?”

That is why I’m at Mashery now, and I feel great about what we’re doing. We focus on success by focusing on doing a few key things, starting with service and scale. In order to be successful in any cloud computing business, it has to be multitenant, and it has to scale with your business.

How did we keep our customers running during the recent Amazon outage? We built from the ground up to be multitenant, and that means we just keep working. We fail over in apps, we fail over in zones, we fail over in regions, and we fail over between providers, because we’re multitenant. We are highly available. We operate at 25%-30% capacity, so we can handle spikes. We’ve learned over five years how APIs work in the world, so we can handle surprises and disruptions.

Of course, we do a lot more than that. But we start by getting the first things right.