Raven goes to Cloud Connect

James Roten and Barry Bestpitch at Cloud Connect Trade show in Silicon Valley.

Over the years I have attended my fair share of trade shows and conventions. Some have been extremely informational and helpful, and others – well, not so much. This last Wednesday my colleague, James Roten and I went to this years Cloud Connect in the heart of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, CA. With our offices in San Francisco, CA the drive was short and James and I discussed what we hoped to discover at this year’s convention. This year’s show was good and we forged what could possibly be a few good relationships with some potential partners.

As the two primary partners of Raven Cloud Computing and Raven IT Consulting, our focus has always been clear – to bring enterprise type services to the SMB (small and medium business) space at affordable prices. As you can guess, this has been a long journey with many dead ends along the way, but the information we gained has proved invaluable and in the long run has pushed us to learn new technologies and at look at problems from different perspectives. All said – we have even improved our offerings and our own business along the way.

This year’s show proved a couple of things, but what was probably the most important nugget of information we learned was that many cloud hardware and software companies are still servicing their products al carte. Out of the 90+ companies in attendance, only four provided more than one cloud product, most focused on their core product.

Observing this actually spoke volumes to us. What we are doing at Raven Cloud Computing is on the right track. By providing a suite of cloud resources (Online Storage, Hosted Exchange, VOIP and Hosted Desktop & Servers) we are in fact probably one of only a handful of cloud providers that offer a portfolio of cloud resources for our customer base.

As we walked the isles of the Cloud Connect it became apparent very quickly that over 70% of the attendees were focusing on enterprise servers and cloud related functionalities.  In catering to the SMB space, the majority of our customers will never see these or be able to afford them.

The remaining 30% or so of Cloud Connect attendees offered a variety of SAAS, IAAS or PAAS (Software, Infrastructure or Platform as a service) offerings. For us, these will become enhancements to our already full cloud portfolio offerings over the coming months. Because of new vendors, products and services that we met at the Cloud Connect – we will revisit our roadmap and offerings to analyze and review any changes or enhancement we may be able to immediately offer.

Personally – I think we got it right and offer an excellent portfolio of cloud services. With our service offerings, essentially our customers can run their entire business in the cloud, from firewalls, servers, desktop, emails, file storage and sharing, plus applications, either desktop, server or web applications. Now at the most fundamental core, customers only need Internet connectivity and some type of device whether a low-end computer, iPad, Smartphone or Netbook. Today – users can let the cloud do the heavy lifting and computing.

If you would like, we provide a Free Technical Assessment, this can be beneficial to new and startup companies that are not sure where to start.

Raven Cloud Computing offers: Cloud Computing | Online File Storage | Hosted Exchange | Cloud Desktops | Cloud Servers |  VOIP |  Support