Conversation with CloudSigma -
CloudSigma and Skimm! stopped by to let me know what they were doing and how that differs from other suppliers of similar services. The conversation reminded me a conversation I had with Boris Renski of Marantis (see Boris Renski argues the case for OpenStack to refresh your memory about that conversation.)
Although Skimm! explained an interesting approach to offering shopping cart services for mobile devices, I'm going to focus on what CloudSigma had to say.
Cloudsigma
Robert Jenkins, Co-founder and CTO of CloudSigma, introduced me to the philosphy behind the products and services his company offers. He started out by explaining that CloudSigma was founded out of frustration with the available cloud services. They were inflexible, not very granular in their approach to management of resources and, in the end, were not a very good extenstion of today's data center.
Sophisticated organizations, he pointed out, need the same level of choice and control that they have in their own data center. They want to be able to choose the operating system and version, the type of hypervisor, the database, the application frameworks, management tools, storage tools and still know that all of those choices would not prevent them from using the outsourced data center offered by the service provider. Most service providers, he commented, make their own choices in all of those categories and present the "my way or the highway" message to their customers.
Snapshot Analysis
I thought that while large organizations would have the skills to deal with the "grocery store" approach to cloud services, smaller organizations may prefer to have those selections made and the results supported by the service provider.
This, I would suspect, would lead them to consider cloud services offered by Amazon, RackSpace and many others.
Although CloudSigma pointed out that one of their more rapidly growing customer segments is made up of information technology startups, I don't think their skills and requirements are representative of the broader market of mid-market companies.
In the end, it is clear that if your organization is looking for a cloud service provider that offers a significant amount of choice in their cloud service offerings, CloudSigma's offerings just might be what you need.