It's a matter of risk. Think of it like a house... Renting vs buying vs building one. All strategies have their benefits.
Renting you let someone else maintain the property and can walk away at any time. This is what CloudKick's current customers all do when they consume the cloud service.
Buying means gaining control. You build equity and have total control over all the maintenance and improvements. And you have all the knowledge that hindsight offers. Is the house in a thriving neighborhood? Was it built well? Did the previous owners take good care of it?
Building means what? Total control over the entire job, from finding architects and contractors, having say in every detail of the design, the budget, bill of materials, schedule, etc.
But the amount of risk is massive here. If funding takes a hit, or budget blows up, what do you do?
Back to software, more projects die in incubation than mature to CloudKick status, no matter how mature the software companies are. Think really hard about how fragile software development practices are.
And there's further risk in the market. If you set out to build your own CloudKick style infrastructure, CloudKick is still out there furiously innovating and battle testing their software. It can be difficult or impossible to catch up.
You are proposing to spend $8MM to build the cloudkick of today in 2 years time. That might be ok if you're just worried about internal tools, but that's no good if you want to offer the service to other providers.
Renting you let someone else maintain the property and can walk away at any time. This is what CloudKick's current customers all do when they consume the cloud service.
Buying means gaining control. You build equity and have total control over all the maintenance and improvements. And you have all the knowledge that hindsight offers. Is the house in a thriving neighborhood? Was it built well? Did the previous owners take good care of it?
Building means what? Total control over the entire job, from finding architects and contractors, having say in every detail of the design, the budget, bill of materials, schedule, etc.
But the amount of risk is massive here. If funding takes a hit, or budget blows up, what do you do?
Back to software, more projects die in incubation than mature to CloudKick status, no matter how mature the software companies are. Think really hard about how fragile software development practices are.
And there's further risk in the market. If you set out to build your own CloudKick style infrastructure, CloudKick is still out there furiously innovating and battle testing their software. It can be difficult or impossible to catch up.
You are proposing to spend $8MM to build the cloudkick of today in 2 years time. That might be ok if you're just worried about internal tools, but that's no good if you want to offer the service to other providers.