As CEO of CAD provider SolidWorks in the early 2000s, John McEleney watched from the sidelines as the Internet grew into a platform for customer connection and e-commerce activity. With CAD software only peripherally affected by the rise of the Worldwide Web, McEleney felt left out.
“I committed to myself that when I saw the next major platform shift,” he says today, “I was going to jump in with both feet and navigate the currents as it was happening.”
It’s no surprise, then, that when cloud computing began its rise to business IT prominence, McEleney wanted in. In early 2009, he assumed the role of CEO at CloudSwitch, a Boston-area start-up dedicated to simplifying the path to the cloud. CloudSwitch’s technology helps IT users port applications from their data centers to a cloud service provider, such as Amazon or Terremark, with minimal hassle.
While cloud computing is often marketed in simplistic terms, moving applications to the cloud is no small task for an IT department, McEleney says. To pre-empt the complexity, users can install CloudSwitch software on a virtual machine in the data center and then drag and drop their applications to the cloud. “It looks and feels like it’s just part of your data center,” he says. “You’re not modifying any of your processes, your tools, any of your applications. It’s just an extension to your data center.”