Building the Cloud in the Cloud, or Not

Cloud Squared

The challenge for new SaaS players is that Capex and Opex for a secure, scalable, highly-available cloud service can easily run to $1M a year per data center.  AWS and Azure mostly remove that barrier for a new venture, but once you reach a certain scale (different for every company) it's cheaper to run your own.   That equation is further altered by the value of any differentiation from use of non-commodity equipment or services.  For Dropbox, now running at very large scale, hardware custom-designed for high-density storage makes economic sense.  For Anaplan, as a high-performance in-memory multi-dimensional planning application, it'll be high density compute + memory.