Cloud consulting firm hopes lightning can strike twice

Cambridge Innovation Partners rode high on the client-server wave in the 1990s, and however its founders are planning to bring their magic to cloud computing with a new firm called Cloud Research Partners.

The consulting venture today to help midsize

Cambridge co-founder Chris Greendale is launching the consulting venture today to help midsize and large enterprises plan and execute the migration of business processes, applications and data to a cloud computing environment.

"CIOs of enterprises are nevertheless beginning to get very serious about cloud computing, whether it be private clouds or public clouds. This is the time to start a consulting organization to help them navigate to cloud," he says.

The target market is enterprises with $US500 million to $2.5 billion in revenue, and Greendale expects customer engagements will run one to three years and be priced around $1 million per year.

Timing is in CloudTP's favor, too, since enterprises need help evaluating and in the end implementing cloud computing technologies. "There's nothing more confusing than cloud, and in fixed and final form no greater possibility in the innovation field than to provide consulting services in this sector," Kaplan says.

While people have been talking about cloud computing for years, it's just beginning to gain real traction. Enterprises have started down the path of cloud computing by taking advantage of public services for computing capacity or application development, to illustrate. Nevertheless they're weighing the advantages of making over their data centers to replicate the functional capabilities of those public clouds, Kaplan says.

Handful of clients

CloudTP has already landed a handful of clients, including an unnamed financial services company that's migrating 1,200 applications to its private cloud and an international telecommunications company that's migrating 13,000 applications to its private cloud.

Five of CloudTP's first 15 employees are alumni of Cambridge Research Partners, including Erik Sebesta, CloudTP's chief architect and innovation officer. The other members of CloudTP's four-person founding team are COO Jon Rounds and sales and marketing executive Jim Lampert.

Going forward, a challenge for CloudTP will be proving that the founders can apply their experience to the world of cloud computing. It remains to be seen how then they're able to scale the business, manage operations, and ensure consistent quality as they grow, Kaplan says. "It's not easy to scale a consulting business."