China has entered the world of cloud computing. Looking back, it’s hard to distinguish the point when things moved onto the cloud. Nearly everything from email, music, video, file storage, software mysteriously sits on the cloud.
Madeiracloud raised an Angel investment last June to better organize cloud applications.
CEO Dan O’Prey and CTO Zhao Peng call themselves the Microsoft Visio of cloud computing. Their WYSIWYG web GUI enables users to simply drag and drop their cloud resources on to a canvas and connect them visually to configure the ports. Once the architecture has been designed, a template (stack) of the whole set up can be saved for reuse and launched multiply times in to live applications, without having to worry about conflicts in configuration.
They claim that no other cloud management system has their unique GUI by taking a more holistic approach. Their stack concept is said to allow applications to be reused, shared and demonstrated in minutes rather than hours or days.
The main business case is leveraging the public cloud to take advantage of on demand resources to demo proof of concept (PoC) software to potential clients.
Madeiracloud closest competitor is a small start-up called AppCara. However they don’t see them as a big threat as they “believe that we are a lot further down the development cycle and our product has superior usability and functionality.”
The business model will work like many other SaaS. There is no initial set up fee, but a free package – limited to 2 running applications; a pro package – limited up to 10 running applications for $99/month; and an enterprise package – with pricing depending on requirements