From time to time, we profile companies in the Cloud Computing space. In this edition, let us check out Sonoa Systems, a provider of software/virtual appliance to manage SaaS APIs and other webservices. Sonoa Systems, founded in 2004, is based in Santa Clara, California with offices in Bangalore, India. The company is backed by some high profile investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and SAP ventures. They also received Series C funding in October of last year from Third Point Ventures. I got a chance to talk to Chet Kapoor, CEO of Sonoa Systems, and they offer some innovative solutions helping companies with their Cloud strategies and also have some really interesting stuff in the pipeline.
Sonoa Systems is uniquely positioning itself to help enterprises and SaaS providers with analytics, performance, security, compliance and regulations, etc.. Sonoa Appliance sits between the service provider and users offering
- Analytics – With Sonoa, it is possible to slice through the usage of a service to understand various metrics like who is using the service, SLA issues, how customers use the resources, etc.. They offer charts and reports that will help service providers make crucial business decisions. The best part of Sonoa Systems is that they could easily scale according to the usage during peak times.
- Security – Sonoa helps service providers decide access control to their APIs based on content, user profiles, etc.. They also help protect sensitive data from unauthorized access.
- Governance – Sonoa offers policy based enforcement of shared services, Managing performance by controlling the operational overhead etc..
Essentially, they offer a framework that can be used to completely manage the API ecosystem of an enterprise or a SaaS vendor. They could do everything from data management, data protection to SLA monitoring, Load Balancing to, even, tackling Regulatory issues. With this comprehensive solution in place, enterprises and SaaS providers can just focus on their core business and let Sonoa Systems do the heavy lifting like the management, control and security of their services/APIs.
When Mr. Kapoor explained the technology behind their solutions and how it can be used to manage the Cloud based services, the first thing that struck me was the power of their technology that can be tapped by the enterprises to deploy and manage the so called private clouds. The tools offered by Sonoa makes it extremely easy for the enterprises to embrace a Cloud based system either from a public cloud provider or by using the private cloud inside their datacenters or both.
When I understood the power of their technology, I immediately realized that it can play a major role in ensuring the compliance and regulatory issues faced by the providers of SaaS and enterprises. I queried Mr. Kapoor about it and he said they are working on features that could help service providers tackle the regulatory and compliance issues easily. He promised to talk to me about it when they are ready. This is going to be pretty exciting because it has the potential to solve some of the important issues facing the Cloud vendors today and it will also help skeptical enterprise customers embrace cloud computing.
They have some big companies as clients including JP Morgan Chase, Warner Music Group, Level 3, etc.. In fact, one of the biggest pharma player, Pfizer, has used Sonoa Systems to secure their webservices and also to increase the performance of their XML based applications. Sonoa’s solutions helped them run their applications almost 10 times faster. Today, Sonoa announced that MTV has selected them to optimize its online and mobile content distribution solutions. Sonoa’s ServiceNet will provide MTV Networks with increased reliability, control and visibility as they expand the delivery of video feeds and open their APIs to partners and consumers in the cloud.
I am going to watch this company in the space. Especially, I am keen on seeing how they fill the needs of SaaS vendors and enterprises in managing their regulatory requirements. Their focus on enterprises, a fact emphasized by Mr. Kapoor again and again, will help accelerate the trend towards enterprise cloud adoption once they implement the features pertaining to compliance and regulations. The very fact that IBM offers Sonoa’s offering as a part of their mashup server series speaks volumes about the effectiveness of their solutions.
