XenServer Backup
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@olivier said:
@scottalanmiller We are in a niche market. And lower cost is only possible if it's scalable. But scalable means more complex pricing, for us and for customers. There is no "trivial" way ^^
I think it is only niche because of some of these decisions. It's not naturally niche.
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I know that in Norway, they are working on developing a venture capital ecosystem but it is a struggle. The older generation thinks of protecting their money in terms of "putting it in the bank" and only slightly hedging against inflation. In the US, we think of protecting our money in terms of keeping it out of banks and getting it straight into money making business ventures so that it makes more money.
There is a huge opportunity for smart US investors, because it is just natural here, to invest abroad in start ups as they people ready to do the new businesses are there, but crippled by the lack of local investment.
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@scottalanmiller Hmm.. XenServer market is around 100k companies around the world. This IS a niche market by definition (comparing to VMWare)
We didn't start commercial stuff with XO without having some figures of the industry. Now if you have other data, I'm always eager to read them
Why only XenServer users? Because they are easy to target AND convert when you start the business (works out of the box. People won't change their hypervisors like that).
edit: I like the "think big" stuff, but as I said, that's not possible in Europe.
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So @olivier do you need more investors and what is the asking "put" from investors to get into the business?
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@DustinB3403 There is no short answer to this question ^^
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@olivier said:
@scottalanmiller Hmm.. XenServer market is around 100k companies around the world. This IS a niche market by definition (comparing to VMWare)
Ah, but that's not a good way to look at the market. Look at it this way...
XenServer's registered install base is 100K companies. That's a small number of the real installs combined with the Xen installs. I know of no company with XenServer that reports to Citrix or to anyone. Some do, 100K do, but most do not. So the install base is more likely something like 500K or a million.
But that doesn't matter. What does?
The XenServer market for companies that need a good interface option is.... 100K or 500K or a million. How many VMware players need an interface replacement solution? Zero.
So, in reality, XenServer is the biggest market here.
Now, make this work with Hyper-V too and your market would explode. Add KVM, explode again. You could easily have a product that is anything but niche. You could have the go to interface for the entire sensible virtualization market. All three products are in need of a free, open source solution for this. With a little push in the right direction you could literally own the global market. Sure, most won't pay. But the number that would would be... huge.
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This is turning into a AMA.....
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@olivier said:
edit: I like the "think big" stuff, but as I said, that's not possible with European investors.
FTFY
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As far as niche, I think that you are missing something else there. The size of the Xen and XenServer non-cloud market is capped by a few things...
- Lack of backup solutions
- Lack of free and low cost third party solutions
- Lack of extensive, easy to use interfaces
Who solves these problems? You do. Who determines the niche-ness of the Xen market? To quite some degree, you do.
Why does any company not use Xen? Basically the reasons above and/or confusion. Now, confusion takes a huge toll on good products and you cant magically overcome that. But the rest, you can. You have an opportunity to redefine the Xen marketplace.
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Something else to consider (realize this from a guy who strongly believes in the "go big or go home" school of business) is that you could up the ante from supporting Xen Orchestra only to supporting Xen. You could, and this isn't free I realize, create your own Xen distro, that is entirely yours, and provide the entire thing as a package with XO bundled in with support. You could even go so far as to do so with hardware bundled in. And charge for the support of the entire thing.
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@scottalanmiller should be the years of doing this, but I'm not sharing this view anymore. Well, ideally yes, I would like things working like that. But never found someone else with money here agree with that.
Connecting to another hypervisor is totally possible (and even by design), but it will require time AND money (ie: hiring more people)
I have TONS of ideas, (in fact all the ideas you gave here, already got them
). But how the heck I can accomplish this without showing investors they can trust me? I can't tell them "go big or go home". I need to demonstrate the business is viable at least.So one thing after another. Or give me one million $ ^^
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@olivier said:
So one thing after another. Or give me one million $ ^^
In the US we have the opposite problem. Only ask for $1m and they won't take you seriously. They want to see enough money in the bank that you can run without a single dollar in profits for four years.
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@scottalanmiller I wasn't born in the right country so ^^
@anonymous sorry for the AMA...
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@olivier Nothing wrong with an AMA.
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@olivier said:
@scottalanmiller I wasn't born in the right country so ^^
That hinders the connections you have, but not the opportunities. In some ways, it provides more opportunities.
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@olivier have you considered doing a VC Crowdfunded type of thing?
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You'd hit a much larger base of people (who don't need millions sitting in a bank to support you), while still pulling in the needed money to support and grow the business.
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@DustinB3403 the first round was something like that (at our local scale). We are not in a bad/urgent situation either. We "just" got a "limited bandwidth".
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@DustinB3403 said:
@olivier have you considered doing a VC Crowdfunded type of thing?
Not a bad idea.
