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EXECUTIVE CHAIR
ENGINE FOR GROWTH When wemeet at the fringes of the DublinWeb Summit, I ask Dillon to explain further the successful Engine Yardmodel. “Our customers are development teams that are building,
deploying and managing applications in the cloud,” he explains. “We don’t really sell our product, it’s more that we help cus- tomers buy the product and provide information on how it works, and how they can get started. “We putmost of our investment as a business into that;we do
online chat, phone calls, emails, text messaging,” says Dillon. “That is one of the things that’s interesting about the service models now, that the vendor hasmuchmore intimacy with the customer.We can see what the customer is doing, we can see when they deploy an application,when it crasheswe can patch it.
“We can actually see when the customer’s having difficulty
and respond. So, our people will watch that and perhaps send a text message saying, ‘Hey, I’m available for some help if you need it’ and then if the customer does need some help, our peo- ple can walk themthrough a process. “And we can do all of that from
Dublin, in fact we could do it pretty much from anywhere,” says Dillon. “But we need a time zone presence and we need a vibrant tech commu- nity, the competencies that we’ve got here. That’s why we’re opening up in Dublin, to service the English speak- ing countries and eventuallywe’ll han- dle all the other countries in Europe.”
you don’t have to knowhowmuch compute resource you need, and it’s also pay as you go so it’s a little bit like the electricity that comes out of yourwall. If you need more you use it and you get a bigger bill at the end of themonth, and if you use less and you conserve you don’t need asmuch. “In the past itwould be like you had to build your own power
plant. Now it is elastic, it’s pay as you go and there’s no capital expenditure. For development teams, it makes them much more productive. They can experiment and they can innovate and if the innovation doesn’twork they haven’t spent thatmuch money. “There’s an expression that we use in Silicon Valley which is
‘Fail Fast’. In other words, try something, if it doesn’t work that’s okay, we learn something and we move on and we do something new. That’s been very, very important. “The other aspect of innovation is a concept called time to
value. If you want to innovate and it takes you three or four years to do your innovation, it’s very possible that you may be too late. If there’s value in the innovation you want it now, not
WONDER OF THE CLOUD In the early days Engine Yard had its own servers and data centreswhere it ran the various data applications, until the cloud began to emerge as a solution. “As companies like Amazon with the Amazon web services came forward with the cloud, we got out of that business and nowthe build, deploy,manage process that we supply to our customers is run on Amazon, as well as on other clouds.” Unsurprisingly, Dillon is a major advocate of cloud comput-
ing and its disruptive effect on traditional enterprise comput- ing. “The cloud is reallywonderful. IT generally is complex, it’s expensive, it’s hard to understand and it changes very quickly. What’s emerging is, in companies like Amazon with their web services, you have someone who knows how to scale very, very large data centres and knows how to build this stuff that’s ex- pensive and hard to do. “In essence what they’re doing is they’re commoditising this
and they’re abstracting the complexity away so that develop- ment teams can build these applications quicklywithout having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. “
SPARK FOR INNOVATION And it creates a spark for innovation, continuesDillon. “Imean, there’s a couple of aspects of the cloud that are sort of pro- pounding companies like Engine Yard. It’s elasticwhichmeans
22 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 3 Autumn/Winter 2011
‘Ifwe’re going to create jobs and improve the world economywe need innovation and faster innovation.We need tomake humansmore
productive.The cloud is, I believe, a real driving factor here’
in two or three years, so the idea is that you don’t have toworry about this underlying infrastructure, about developing a com- petency, that you can take the risk. That makes development teamsmuchmore
productive.At EngineYardwe’re right in the heart of that and it’s a great place to be!” Of course this means speed to market for innovative start-
ups, notes Dillon. He recalls the early days of
Salesforce.com. “At Salesforce we had to buy servers, we had to put them in a facility, we had to have expertise around systems engineering and data centre operations. We probably spent about US$5– 10m on infrastructure before we did find the US$10m in rev- enue. “Today if you were to start a company you could just go to
some place like Engine Yard and get the benefits of our devel- opment platform, and ofAmazon’s Cloud and you can build the application very inexpensively. And when it’s deployed you re- ally don’t spend verymuchmoney unless the application’s suc- cessful.” Dillon refers to another Silicon Valley expression used today
for start-ups. “We sayUS$500,000 is the newUS$5m. In other words, for a fewhundred thousand a companywith a great idea can get started, can put it out on the internet and if the con- sumers of that application like it, then the company can start
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