When SkillsVillage Inc. and QuinStreet Inc. went looking for vendors to provide the hardware and software infrastructures for their e-commerce businesses, their missions were similar. Both selected Loudcloud Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., to expand their Web capabilities. By developing standardized systems that can be easily scaled to fit a client's needs, Loudcloud says, it can build the infrastructure from the ground up in just eight weeks and get that infrastructure working on the Web. It's still up to the customers to code the business logic for their sites, design their sites' user interfaces and perform testing. The production code is then deployed on Loudcloud's hardware and monitored by Loudcloud.
Monthly fees range from five to six figures or more.
Service providers must be able to grow at the same rate as their clients. What makes it unique in a crowded field, says CEO and co-founder Ben Horowitz, is the firm's customized software, called Opsware. Loudcloud offers its services under the name Smart Clouds, which includes Web Cloud for Web hosting and Database Cloud for database hosting. Tim Howes, chief technology officer at LoudCloud, says that Opsware covers everything from backup recovery to capacity planning and system performance analysis. But he refuses to state how Opsware actually works.