MultiValue technology veteran Mark Pick recently launched a new company, Pick Cloud, Inc. Here, Pick - whose name is synonymous with MultiValue thanks to his father Dick Pick, who is widely credited as a founding father of MultiValue software - discusses the reasons he embarked on the new venture and his goals for the company. “A lot of people worry about latency issues in moving to the cloud, but of all the applications that exist out there, a traditional Pick application is very thin, very low bandwidth so that wasn’t going to be an issue,” notes Pick. “And, when we go down the list of things that we can provide for our customers, number-one, it is fast and easy to deploy.”
Why did you start Pick Cloud?
Pick: I was working with customers and realized that the new servers were very powerful yet so under-utilized that customers were probably using about 10% of the actual horsepower of the server. They were not taking advantage of the horsepower that they paid for. I realized that it was possible to virtualize servers and start to divvy up the equipment – but there were not a lot of people doing that in our space. The more I researched it, the more I saw it was very prevalent in cloud computing with a lot of hosting companies and this is what they were doing. We polled the user community, and we reached probably 5,000 MultiValue clients in our survey to see if they were interested and 75% of the people that responded said they would consider a cloud initiative over the next 18 months.
What is unique about your approach?
Pick: We are offer a fully managed data center that manages the complete environment from soup to nuts. I wanted to provide a worry-free environment, where there are no more headaches, no upgrading servers, no disk outages or concerns about power so customers can go back to what they do best. However, I knew early on that I didn’t have that expertise so it was paramount to partner up with a proper hosting company. I have partnered with Hosting.com, which has data centers all across the country so we can provide full disaster recovery.
Is there a customer segment you are targeting and what are the benefits?
Pick: There is no specific profile, but I found that it fits small and medium customers well. One of the big benefits that we talk about is the value of the service being an operating expense versus a capital expense, and instead of them paying 10,000 or 30,000 for a server, we can set them up for as little as $400 a month. In addition, a lot of people worry about latency issues in moving to the cloud, but of all the applications that exist out there, a traditional Pick application is very thin, very low bandwidth so that wasn’t going to be an issue. And, when we go down the list of things that we can provide for our customers, number-one, it is fast and easy to deploy. We offer 24x7 availability, uptime is 99.999%, and we take care of all their backups. And lastly is the energy savings for heating and cooling.
What has been the reaction so far and what is ahead?
Pick: We have had some early wins, and also had just a tremendous amount of feedback and a lot of questions. Our market is mature and cloud has never really come up. People are gun-shy because it is new technology to the MultiValue community. What I am all about is continuing to rejuvenate the MultiValue community and helping customers preserve their Pick applications. Taking them to the cloud obviously can do that going forward. In addition, our goal is to eventually expand to provide database as a service for the MultiValue community.
For more information, go to www.mypickcloud.com