(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In the day’s opening Paralles Summit keynote, Go Daddy president and COO Warren Adelman talked about how his company competes with industry giants; because even with 7,6 million customers worldwide, Go Daddy still has to differentiate itself from other cloud services providers.
While it’s not surprising that “the cloud” is discussed so much at the Parallels Summit, Adelman said that perhaps we get too enamoured with the term, and that it becomes commical when every single service is “cloud”.
Adelman went to the streets of Scottsdale, Arizona, and in a humorous video segment, showed that a lot of the terms that our industry come up with are meaningless to the people who are potential customers.
By talking to people on the street, who may never attend a tech conference in their lifetimes, Adelman came to a logical conclusion: that customers care about a service provided, rather than a buzz term.
Adelman went into a number of ways that service providers can make their cloud services fit with customer needs.
Ease of use: Amazon has a more sophisticated customer set, but it turns off many SMB customers. Go Daddy doesn’t bombard its customers with technical information.
Stability: Bad press happens at the speed of Twitter — ie. seconds of downtime can generate a lot of bad press.
Predictability: Cycles, and per-hour computing don’t really make sense to a lot of people, and in many ways, delivery models have moved from technical billing terms to simple, unlimited plans.
Security: Data loss is a huge concern that slowing down cloud adoption. Security breaches at one cloud environment my lead to others being compromised because people often use the same passwords. “Instead of federated security, it’s federated insecurity,” Adelman said.
Customer service: No telephone support for Google’s Nexus One was a major error when there were technical issues. When people face an issue, they want that personal support — they want to hear a voice.
Listen to customers: Go Daddy has announced a partnership with Apple and Parallels to release Cloud Server Powered by Mac OS X today.
Transparency: You had to sign an Non-Disclosure Agreement with Microsoft just to see Azure’s SLA, and that’s simply an unacceptable transparency practice.
Adelman noted that he and nearly everyone attending his session has been in the cloud business before the word became fashionable, and perhaps it’s good to loose some of the excitement over the idea of cloud services , and focus on customer needs.
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