Interview Notes: 3Tera's Bert Armijo

Last week, I wrote a feature on the efforts of 3Tera, the company behind the AppLogic grid computing platform, and its efforts to extend the deployment of its technology beyond the service provider environment into the enterprise data center.

In aid of that particular article I spoke, as I sometimes do, to 3Tera’s VP of product management Bert Armijo. He is, needless to say, a man with a message, especially when the conversation has to do with the 3Tera products he manages. But he is also a reliably source of insight into his company’s business.

The direct-to-enterprise relationship is a new focus for 3Tera, which had previously aimed its product more squarely at the service provider market. As Armijo explains in the feature, it’s the same software. And as with the service provider relationships that came before, the relationships with enterprise customers require a certain degree of instruction in the platform and its deployment.

Excluded from the final feature, but worth putting out there, I felt, was Armijo’s description of the process - a fairly new institution, though roughly identical to the existing process - by which an enterprise would establish the relationship with 3Tera that would put AppLogic in their facilities, as well as some of the more common situations that accompany that process:

“What we have found thus far is that most of the enterprises we are dealing with actually have an initiative already internally, either to build a utility computing hosting service, or to look at utility computing services and how they can leverage them in their data centers.

“And so if this is an initiative they’ve kicked off already, they have people in charge of that or responsible for that effort. And when we engage with them, they already have some internal plan of how they want to actually leverage the technology. Their questions for us really are how does the system work? How does it fit into their data center operations? How does it fit into their scheme of software? 

“The process typically involves a number of face-to-face and WebEx meetings over the course of a few weeks, at which point they will take an evaluation system, usually hosted, from us and one of our provider partners. There will usually be two or three people involved in that application and they will pick a test application and migrate it over to the hosted grid. That will be the basis for tests that they will run in terms of how does the system operate? What does it take to operate it? How does it deal with typical hardware failures or human error? 

“This is where we get into customers requesting licenses of us. They then make a decision as to whether they want to proceed with hosted resources or with internal resources. And if they want to proceed with internal resources, their next step is to get a license and build their first grid internally, which we help them with. 

“They will pick a few more applications and start moving them onto the grid. This might happen one application per month, or one application per week. Or we have one particular customer who is moving a couple of applications per week on to the grid. 

“During this evaluation stage, they’ll look at the operational aspects of the system, start writing their policies and procedures for how to actually manage the grid and how to manage the applications on the grid. This evaluation process can be anywhere from a couple of months to six months depending upon the company and the complexity of what they’re trying to do.”