Showcasing Cloud Thought Leadership #17/101

As a tech startup, I was very confident about building products and platforms for cloud challenges. I tried to tackle both sides of the problem – service providers offering cloud services and enterprises consuming cloud services. However, this approach was not yielding successful results.

To the service providers, I pitched ActOnCloud as a solution to help them better compete with the Big 3 cloud providers. I would ask them why they were not featured in Gartner’s Top Cloud Provider list.

To the consumer side, I pitched ActOnCloud as a tool to help manage multiple clouds from a single pane of glass.

As my team was engineering-heavy, we needed help with marketing and sales. The cloud management space at that time was heavily crowded, with many well-funded companies. We decided to take a different approach to make our efforts count.

We started by running a tech meetup group in Bangalore. We launched the ‘Hybrid Cloud Meetup Group’ and took over the responsibility of running the ‘CloudStack India Meetup’ Group. This allowed us to connect with many thought leaders and network with other companies. Through blogging about cloud challenges, we were featured in Gartner and Forrester research reports organically, without paying them.

During a Sequoia hackathon event, I was introduced to Aditya Sood, the founder of Calm.io, one of the early leaders in our space. I learned a lot from Aditya – how calm he was, yet very confident in their solution. We explored collaboration opportunities, and soon after, Calm.io was acquired by Nutanix. I thank Aditya for his friendly advice during this period. He encouraged me to continue with ActOnCloud, and I still remember his words: “All the people working in big companies envy you (the founders) because of the freedom founders have and the ability to create an impact.”

Size really does not matter, but the impact that a startup makes does.

How have you showcased your thought leadership?