By silicon.com, 8 February 2005 13:20
NEWS 08.02.00 Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, mapped out the direction of his latest internet business this week.
The company, which is called Loudcloud, unveiled a raft of web offerings based around infrastructure services in the US.
The company - which was founded in September 1999 in collaboration with other former Netscape employees and $68m in funding - is targeting the burgeoning e-business market with infrastructure services for existing bricks-and-mortar companies.
Loudcloud also announced partnerships with EMC, HP, Oracle and Sun for their respective products and services.
Andreessen said in a statement: "Loudcloud is applying world-class software and operations expertise to make it possible for internet businesses to get bigger and focus on their core businesses."
08.02.05 When Andreessen first announced Loudcloud there were a few murmurs, industry-watchers wondering what the wunderkind was up to. In the five years since the above article was published - years which among other things featured half of Loudcloud being hawked off to EDS and a renaming of the remaining half to Opsware - it has become clearer what the reasoning was.
As any number of IT executives will tell you, managing IT operations has become far too complex. This is the sweet spot Opsware is addressing. Sure, people expected 'browser guy' Andreessen to do something, well, sexier, but in conversations he'll explain how the next logical move from Netscape and that company's web server and app server expertise was something like Loudcloud.
We still haven't cracked the whole simplifying IT thing, alas, but Andreessen remains the kind of rainmaker it's worth watching. If he says an area is hot - namely, it's an area that interests him - it's worth taking note.
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