Doyenz: Virtual appliances meet the cloud

Have you ever imagined custom-configuring a server or desktop as a virtual appliance from the cloud? And then downloading it and having it automatically managed, no matter where you run it? Meet Doyenz. Launching (or having just launched) their cloud-based managed service called “Automated Virtual IT” today, I spoke with Ashutosh Tiwary, CEO of Doyenz.

InfoWorld Virtualization Report: For those of us in the virtualization and cloud communities that might not be aware of your company, can you tell us a little bit about what’s behind the interesting name “Doyenz”?

Tiwary: That’s a great place to start. We’re a virtualization and cloud services startup based in Seattle. Doyen, pronounced, ‘dō-‘yen, means one who has gained expertise through experience in a field. Doyenz is about taking the collective expertise of our partners and our in-house experts, encoding them in software, and employing these best practices to custom configure, deploy, and manage virtual appliances. Thus, SMBs can focus their expertise on managing their business — and rely on the expertise of Doyenz and its partners to manage their IT.

IWVR: And what is it that your company is announcing today?

Tiwary: We are very excited to be announcing the general availability of the Doyenz Automated Virtual IT managed service. Our initial beachhead is the SMB market. It’s a large market with huge existing pain, and we’re selling exclusively through the VAR channel that serves the SMB.

Our mission is to solve the problem of quality and efficiency in SMB IT. So Automated Virtual IT is a managed service for VARs and IT consultants that leverages virtualization and cloud services to automate the delivery and management of the SMB IT infrastructure. It enables in-the-cloud custom configuration of production-ready virtual appliances that work out-of-the-box that can be built, deployed, and managed via a SaaS platform.

IWVR: Sounds extremely interesting, can you explain how it works?

Tiwary: Imagine a virtual computer vendor in the cloud. You go to a browser, get a dropdown menu that allows you to select the software and configuration that comprises your virtual appliance, and customize it for your needs. At the press of a button, this custom virtual appliance is configured in the cloud and delivered to you both on-site or hosted in the cloud. The virtual appliance comes pre-configured for 24×7 monitoring and management and automated backup and disaster recovery, and all these capabilities work no matter where you run the virtual appliance. We’re first doing this for Microsoft server products, next for packaged vertical apps, and finally for desktops to enable fully packaged virtual appliance-based vertical solutions to be delivered to the SMB.

IWVR: So explain to readers, if you would, what’s so cool and different about this technology or approach?

Tiwary: A few things that differentiate our solution:

• The killer feature is the ability to have zero-touch disaster recovery and local failover. And to come soon, hot failover in the cloud. This is the primary challenge facing the SMB.
• Enterprises have had test environments forever, but these rarely exist in the SMB because of the additional cost. The ability to have an up-to-date copy of the customer’s production server at any time in a virtual test lab in the cloud is unique. All of a sudden, the IT consultant can test every patch, every upgrade, every new application install and every significant configuration change in the cloud, and at the press of a button download these changes directly into production. This is a very compelling capability and we do not know of others who do this.
• Next, for the first time you can custom-configure any type of server or desktop, and have it deployed and managed from the cloud.
• It’s a complete end-to-end solution that combines many point solutions in a single platform: auto generation of IT infrastructure with best practices, a virtual test lab, off-site disaster recovery, rapid local failover, and 24×7 monitoring and management of IT infrastructure.
• Finally, from a technology perspective, as I stated previously, it’s a hybrid solution that can be used to deploy virtual appliances either on-premise or in the cloud, allowing a dual on-premise/ hosted cloud model. Companies today are still very hesitant to host all of their infrastructure and data in the cloud. It’s still too risky, so this gives them a safer adoption and migration path, ensuring the data security and business continuity they need while taking advantage of a superior technologies, or what I like to call, the New IT Economy, at a lower cost.
• From a business perspective, our solution offers unparalleled business continuity and uptime to the SMB at a low predictable cost and a new IT service delivery model along with recurring revenue stream with better profits to the IT consultant. We have been told repeatedly that this is a no-brainer for SMB IT.

IWVR: How is it priced and sold?

Tiwary: Doyenz Automated Virtual IT is an affordable pay-as-you-go SaaS subscription offering that requires no hardware or software investment. Again, this business model allows IT consultants to build a recurring repeatable revenue stream and grow their profits, providing better service to their customers at a lower and predictable cost.

IWVR: And who would you consider the competition to be?

Tiwary: Although there are companies with adjacent or point-solution offerings, what we’re hearing is that we’re the first company to deliver an end-to-end solution like this. None of the customers, partners, or analysts that we have talked to have identified a company that does what we do, both from a breadth and depth perspective.

IWVR: Pretty ambitious. Why Doyenz?

Tiwary: We are an ambitious and high-achieving team and we like to shoot high. We’re a seasoned management team, and the founders are serial entrepreneurs who have done this before in difficult economic circumstances. It’s a recession-tolerant business with a value-prop that does not require any CAP-EX and enables significant reductions in OP-EX for the customer. We’re validated by being well-funded and backed by angels from Microsoft, Google, and others. And we’re getting very strong validation from the analyst community.

IWVR: Where do you see the market headed? And what’s your vision of the future?

Tiwary: The current economic conditions and the onset and adoption of technologies like virtualization and cloud services are ushering in a new era, an era of the New IT Economy. In this climate, the customers expect better service at a lower predictable cost, while the IT consultants need to build a more profitable business. A low cost, fully automated, end-to-end platform like Automated Virtual IT coupled with a highly efficient and a scalable business model like Doyenz is the wave of the future.

We see this type of model representing the future of computing. The IT services model will move to a hybrid model of on-premise and in-the-cloud computing, and eventually completely to the cloud. First it is SMB IT. Enterprises will be next, and then it will be the consumer market.

IWVR: So then, what’s next for Doyenz?

Tiwary: We’re building an industry standard platform to automate the configuration, testing, deployment, and management of custom-configured virtual appliances. We’ll diversify across multiple verticals and then expand to market segments like enterprise and SOHO. We want other partners to build and deliver many of these solutions on our platform. We’re currently raising a Series A and look forward to the next stage of our market push.

Thanks again to Ashutosh Tiwary, CEO of Doyenz, for taking time out to speak with me during the company’s latest announcement.