An IaaS company has a an average potential valuation of $2.2B each

Derrick Harris from Gigaom Pro has an article restricted to subscribers from May 2011. The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators 

The article picks 50 companies as Cloud Innovators. It lists some exotic names like Nicira, still a stealth company and some well known names such as Dell, who signed a definitive agreement to acquire Force10 Networks, Inc. today, The latter has a long list of investors, twelve to be more precise.

Yet Force 10 was not listed among top 50 Cloud Innovators barely two months ago. It may be an oversight, yet it is impossible to produce lists without oversights.

On July 19, Gigaom published this graph, represented the number of objects stored in AWS S3 over the years


Quote: "Long story short: cloud computing usage is growing overall — at about 100 percent a year in the case of S3 — and AWS looks to be steering the ship for the time being."

Fair enough. What is means is that next year , Amazon will have 1 Trillion S3 Objects. (1 Trillion storage objects raises some other worries, but this is a different story)

Yet I like Gigaom discovery: Cloud is growing at 100% per year. Interesting, Force 10 did not do any storage, yet their function is key in the cloud constellation of companies.

Here is my thinking, a fusion into something tangible: making money.

  • If IaaS market will be $11B sales in 2013 (according to IDC) and we value the companies operating IaaS service , their total valuation will be $220B.
  • Yet most people do not see this potential. The smaller companies with very sound technologies are the best bet.. And the number can double, is Gigaom estimate of cloud computing growth is 100% for another year or two.

  • This is what my work as consultant and rainmaker is. To tell the fledgling, talented IaaS start-ups what I write above and be part of it.

Comments

People often ask me : What consulting you do? Do you do marketing. Sales? Biz Development? Sure I do all of these and I can involve other specialists as needed. But taken separately, the three functions above are not in sync.

Here is the essence of what I do: Say we have start-up valued to not even $1M. How much is the potential value of the venture? Say 200M? 400M, 1B, 2B?. Whatever it is, most people get frightened to think of it. After a bit of analysis, one must select an aggressive number, that stretches the goal but it still realistic , The absolute value of the current shareholders should maximized. Then we look at all activities, including marketing, biz dev and sales, plus looking for alliances and investors an large strategic partners, and ask. Do these AI’s leads us to the
A large company can treat a product the same way, as if were a startup. The value of the outside consultant is an independent, unbiased business potential look from a different angle and help an execution, free of company imposed harnesses - as described in the paragraph above.

If Cisco, HP, IBM, Oracle (or any other large company) will treat every new product as a start up, the results will be different. Facebook, Google and many others, treat new products as a new venture, but they do it with internal employees, most of them highly professional and intelligent. But success is not a function of IQ. Each large company has fantastic entrepreneurs inside their staff, but I can help them express fully, because each company by definition imposes rule that may choke, even unintended, the initiative.
This is what I call a rainmaker. Someone who creates wealth and happiness, at the same time. I just open an oasis of what Umair Haque from Harvard calls “eudaimonic prosperity — lives that are meaningfully well lived “ http://bit.ly/rpOXun

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