Apcera
Careers at Apcera
Mission
Apcera’s mission is to empower modern enterprises to unlock the full power of massive amounts of compute resources and data, all in a unified and trusted way.
History
Derek Collison was the Chief Technology Officer of software company VMware. While there he oversaw a project to rapidly deploy applications into a cloud environment with high production quality. The project was a success, but Collison felt that other factors were important beyond speed of deployment – particularly, the safety, security, and quality of the cloud platform.
Inspired to create his own solution, he left VMware in 2012, and spent two weeks exploring a companies’ relevant challenges. Many businesses were becoming leery of placing all their workloads in single clouds lest the cloud got compromised. So Collison came up with the idea for a trusted multi-cloud platform that would enable customer to work efficiently across the clouds.
He founded a company for the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tool, called Apcera – derived from Apsara, a spirit unlimited in ability. He sought investments for his venture and was successful, raising $2.2 million in seed funding, largely on the strength of his background. Apcera is now described as a policy-driven platform for cloud-native applications, microservices, and legacy applications.
Benefits at Apcera
Business model of Apcera
Customer Segments
Apcera has a mass market business model, with no significant differentiation between customer segments. The company targets its offerings at firms across industries and sizes.
Value Proposition
Apcera offers three primary value propositions: accessibility, convenience, performance, risk reduction, and brand/status.
The company creates accessibility by providing a wide variety of options. It has multi-cloud capabilities, enabling useres to work efficiently across private, public, and hybrid clouds.
The company offers convenience by simplifying customers’ operations. It brings all of the capabilities of the PaaS and container management markets together into a single platform – including building new apps, refactoring legacy apps, running dockers securely, and scaling across any cloud.
The company has demonstrated strong performance. It claims its solution offers up to 6x faster time-to-market speed, reduces operational and capital expenditures by up to 50%, reduces security audit times by as much as 70%, and provides as much as 10x savings.
The company reduces risk by delivering fine-grained cloud security services and linking policy with enforcement. Consequently, it prevents security breaches and defines precise service access across customers’ entire cloud infrastructure.
The company has established a strong brand due to its performance. It has a number of prominent clients, including Ericsson, Qualcomm, jetBlue, nextSource, and Cygate. It has also won a number of honors, including two Bronze Stevie Awards (2015), a Silver Best in Biz Award for “Fastest-Growing Company of the Year” (2015), and recognition as a 2016 Emerging Vendor by CRN.
Channels
Apcera’s main channel is its direct sales team. The company promotes its offering through its website, social media pages, expos, and participation in conferences.
Customer Relationships
Apcera’s customer relationship is primarily of a self-service, automated nature.
Customers utilize the service through the main platform while having limited interaction with employees. The company’s website features a “Resource Library” section that includes self-help tools such as white papers, solution briefs, data sheets, videos, and webinars. The site also offers self-paced training in the form of product tutorial videos and product documentation.
Despite this orientation, there is a personal service component in the form of instructor-led one-day training courses on the Apcera platform.
Key Activities
Apcera’s business model entails maintaining a robust PaaS platform for its customers.
Key Partners
Apcera maintains various partnerships through which it works with technology providers to drive innovation and enhance the customer experience. Its partners fall into the following categories:
- Strategic Partner – Apcera partners with Ericsson
- Technology Partners - Specific partners are Amazon Web Services, Apigee, Canonical, CoreOS, Docker, IBM SoftLayer, Mirantis, and New Relic
- Company Alliances – Specific partners are Ammeon, Logimethods, Tata Consultancy Services, Tenea, and Williams & Garcia
Key Resources
Apcera’s main resource is its proprietary software platform.
It depends on its engineering employees to maintain and update the platform, its sales staff to promote it, and its training staff to provide instruction.
As a relatively new startup it has relied on funding from outside parties, raising $7.2 million from five investors as of September 2014.
Cost Structure
Apcera has a cost-driven structure, aiming to minimize expenses through significant automation. I
ts biggest cost driver is likely sales/marketing, a fixed cost.
Other major drivers are in the areas of customer support/operations and product development, both fixed expenses.
Revenue Streams
Apcera has one revenue stream: the subscription fees it charges for access to its PaaS platform, specifically the “Enterprise” edition (the “Community” edition is free).
Fees are based on the number of assets that clients use, be they memory or nodes; sales staff must be contacted for pricing quotes.
