Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?
Ellen Rubin and John Considine are co-founders of CloudSwitch. Ellen was an early employee at Netezza and following a successful IPO, she joined John Considine (formerly with Sun Microsystems) to start CloudSwich. With a lot of data center experience in their backgrounds, both Ellen and John realized the opportunity that the cloud represented to the enterprise, but they also knew the challenges. More specifically, if enterprises wanted to take advantage of the cloud they were going to have to re-write or re-architect all of their existing applications, networking, security capabilities and management tools. Needless to say this was going to be an expensive, time consuming barrier to entry for most companies. CloudSwitch was founded to help solve this problem and make the cloud enterprise-ready.

John and Ellen quickly raised a $7.4M Series A financing and recruited George Moberly (VP Product Management, formerly of Bladelogic) and Fred Olivera (Chief Architect, formerly of EMC). Shawn Henry (VP Engineering, formerly RSA) and John McEleney (CEO, formerly of SolidWorks) joined shortly thereafter. Outside investors were interested in the company and the management team received a pre-emptive $8M Series B financing a short 6 months after the A round.

What about your experience and history before CloudSwitch?
I have worked in the application software industry for over 20 years. I joined SolidWorks when it was approximately 20 employees and $0 in revenue. I was the CEO from 2001 to 2007, and during this period we tripled the business from approximately $100M to over $350M. I have a technical background, moved to sales and marketing and have been in senior management for approximately 15 years.

What market segments are you targeting?
CloudSwitch’s software can be used by enterprises in a wide range of industries. We are focusing on companies and industries that are likely to be the earlier adopters of public clouds. These tend to be medium to large enterprises that have existing data centers, with virtualization of at least a part of their servers and a desire to take advantage of the cost and agility benefits of the cloud.

Where did the company get its name?
As the name suggests, CloudSwitch is focused on helping companies who want to switch to the cloud, and to have the flexibility of switching between multiple clouds and their data centers.

Is there a person or company involved with Cloud storage that you admire or are keeping an eye on?
While CloudSwitch is not specifically in the cloud storage space, we think there are several great companies in this area, including Carbonite, Nasuni and Actifio.

Why create a new company? Aren’t there already many suppliers involved with leveraging the cloud?
As you would expect, with a computing platform shift like cloud computing, we’veseen a plethora of new companies with innovative offerings to help people take advantage of this new platform. Many companies are focused on providing public cloud services, or helping enterprises build their own internal clouds. At CloudSwitch we’ve taken the unique approach of extending the corporate data center out to the cloud through our CloudSwitch software appliance, enabling enterprises to take advantage of cloud computing securely, easily and affordable without changing their applications or management tools.

How is portability a concern on where you want to host your applications?
Without CloudSwitch, portability is a big challenge for enterprises, since they’d have to re-architect their applications for a specific cloud, and would then be locked into that cloud if they decided to move between clouds or back to the data center. With CloudSwitch, portability is not a concern, since our software automatically takes care of all of the logistics in moving a customer’s applications to the cloud.

When is the right time to move to the cloud?
Enterprise IT departments are struggling with costly, over-provisioned and un-responsive data centers. They are eager to find ways to move to the cloud to take advantage of its on-demand pricing and rapid, self-service provisioning. The cloud provides the ability to offload specific applications and avoid expensive build-outs, as well as to scale our capacity as needed for applications with short-term or cyclical demand, especially web and test/development apps. For most enterprises, the time to move to the cloud is now.

What things are holding cloud computing back from wider adoption. What issue is top-most in your mind and why?
It is very clear that the cloud as a compute platform is real and it is happening today. Like any major platform shift, people are going through a process to understand the benefits for their organization, the risks and the challenges. The single greatest perceived issue is security. Organizations are concerned, and rightfully so, about how secure their applications and data can be in the cloud. At CloudSwitch we designed our solution from the ground up to provide provable end-to-end security, including encryption of all data and communications, in transit and at rest, enterprise control over key management, and roles-based access controls for authorization and permissions.

How would you compare your firm with Enomaly, TwinStrata?
Enomaly and TwinStrata are in different segments of the cloud market. Both of these solutions are targeting the data storage segment. While CloudSwitch does deal with storage-related issues, we are focused on moving applications (with NO changes) to the cloud. As a result of moving these applications we can take the full stack (including data) or people can “stretch” the application from the cloud back to the data center.

For the technologist reading this or the “Cloud Champion” who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about your product/service?
Our patent-pending Cloud Isolation Technology enables seamless migration of applications to the cloud, and full isolation of the customer’s cloud resources, so they remain under enterprise control. In addition, we automatically create a layer 2 network to bridge between the data center and the cloud, so that the cloud-based applications retain their original data center IP addresses, identity, etc. and still look exactly as they did in the data center.

What channels are being used to sell CloudSwitch?
We are reaching out to customers directly via the internet as well as inside sales.

Do you have any OEM deals now or is this being looked at?
We are engaged in many discussions with many players.

As chief executive officer at CloudSwitch, John McEleney brings over two decades of experience in scaling software businesses to market leadership. Prior to joining CloudSwitch, John was the CEO of SolidWorks Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dassault Systems S.A. (NASDAQ: DASTY). John’s rise to CEO was built on his strong record of results over a 20-year career in the CAD industry. During his tenure as CEO, annual revenues grew from US $100 million in 2001 to over $350 million in 2007.

Before joining SolidWorks, John held management positions at Computervision, where he was involved in a wide array of functions including marketing and product development. John has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester, a master’s degree in manufacturing systems from Boston University, and a master’s degree in business administration and marketing from Northeastern University.