Inc Loudcloud - Loudcloud's Core Solution, Smart Cloud Expands The Loudcloud Operational Environment, Loudcloud Goes Public

Loudcloud, Inc. was founded in September 1999 by some of the Internet's earliest innovators, including Netscape Communications Corp. co-founder Marc Andreessen and former Netscape and America Online (AOL) executive Ben Horowitz. Other members of the founding team included Tim Howes, who co-invented the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which became the Internet standard for directories; and Sik Rhee, who designed the Kiva application server. All four members of the founding team worked together at Netscape and then at AOL after Netscape was acquired by AOL and Sun Microsystems. Horowitz was the executive in charge of AOL's e-commerce platform division and oversaw the development of Shop@AOL, the Internet's largest shopping destination.

Loudcloud offers a complete solutions package for companies to outsource their global Internet operations. The company stresses that it is not simply an Internet consulting firm, an application service provider (ASP), or a data center provider. Rather, it describes itself as a software infrastructure service provider. Beyond hosting or managing services, Loudcloud provides the technology to automate the operations environment to give customers reliability, efficiency, and performance in a single solution. Thus, while Loudcloud sells a service, it is the company's own Opsware automation technology that makes its service so powerful; and the Opsware software is not sold as packaged software.

Companies who have outsourced some or all of their Internet operations to Loudcloud include America Online (AOL), for whom Loudcloud is a preferred provider of e-commerce technologies, including the merchant portion of AOL's QuickCheckout wallet technology and future shopping technologies. In March 2001 Loudcloud announced that the News Corporation—owned Web sites Foxsports.com, Foxnews.com, and Fox.com would be deployed, scaled, managed, and monitored using Loudcloud's Opsware automation technology. That same month Loudcloud added USAToday.com to its list of customers.

By providing solutions for outsourcing global Internet operations, Loudcloud enables its customers to focus on the key business decisions that will give them a competitive advantage instead of spending their time making thousands of technical decisions. While data centers provide basic Web-hosting services and Internet consulting firms help companies design their top-level customer application, Loudcloud provides a complete infrastructure solution. Outsourcing their Internet operations to Loudcloud frees companies from the need to hire talented operations personnel to manage their Web site; the need to procure the right hardware, software, storage, and networking components; the need to deploy a secure operational environment; the need to monitor the site on a 24/7 basis and keep it up and running; and the need to scale the site by adding capacity and functionality as business grows.