Loudcloud, Inc. Monday previewed a comprehensive set of new infrastructure services, code-named “Instant ASP” and “Global Connect.” These new services are designed to speed global growth and the transition of software companies into application service providers.
“For companies to continue to flourish on the Internet, the process of adding new services and global growth needs to be dramatically simplified,” said Ben Horowitz, president and CEO of Loudcloud. “Instant ASP and Global Connect reflect the evolution and learning from working with our customers. This helps our next generation of services continue to evolve to meet customer needs.”
Global Connect is designed to accelerate and simplify the global expansion of a business’ Internet efforts. Global Connect will include global load balancing and global disaster recovery. Through the use of Loudcloud’s Opsware automation technology, Loudcloud will be able to fail a customer’s Internet operations over from its presence in a Silicon Valley data center to a data center on the East Coast or in the United Kingdom in the event of a natural or technical disaster.
To support the growing number of ASPs as customers, Loudcloud also announced Instant ASP, a new set of infrastructure services designed specifically for ASPs. Included in the offering is ASP operational services, a set of new services that includes the application functionality an ASP needs — configuration, management, billing, customer monitoring, and log management — in order to offer a software application as an Internet-based service. A new scaling technology called Rapid Restore lets Loudcloud instantaneously tap into a pool of stand-by servers to replace a failed machine in a live environment. The technology helps ASP customers to offer high-availability solutions without incurring the costs of full redundancy at each tier.
Loudcloud’s new services are based on the knowledge that Loudcloud has gathered in working with a number of high growth ASPs. Among the ASPs that have already subscribed to Loudcloud’s infrastructure services are BlackHog, Catapulse, eDeploy.com, Interelate, Mercury Interactive, StatementOne and MetaTV. Instant ASP and Global Connect services are scheduled to debut in the market throughout Q4 2000.
Loudcloud, Inc. was formed in September 1999 by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and former Netscape/AOL executives Ben Horowitz, Tim Howes and In Sik Rhee. Loudcloud’s Smart Cloud services encompass the complete suite of software, hardware, network and operations infrastructure — including procuring, architecting, and managing these core components — as a turn-key service. These Smart Cloud services leverage Loudcloud’s proprietary Opsware automation technology to deliver scalability and reliability for a broad base of customers.
See related ASPnews.com story, Star Startups Host Apps, Feb 8th 2000.
