Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Silicon Valley veteran Andy Bechtolsheim. While at Stanford University, Bechtolsheim devised a powerful computer (which he called a workstation) because he was tired of waiting for computer time on the central university system. Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy approached him to market his invention and start Sun – derived from “Stanford University Network.” Sun Microsystems quickly became a success, with a market capitalization by 2003 of $11.5 billion. Today, Andy is Chairman of Arista Networks, a company that delivers networking solutions for large data centers and high-performance computing environments.
Andy will be speaking on a live webcast this Thursday, May 13, at 11:00 a.m. PDT, where he will also field questions from the audience.
If you are an entrepreneur or you are part of a growing start-up, then you're no doubt laser-focused on developing and marketing something game-changing. From experience, I know that you can’t afford to siphon off resources toward anything that’s not core to the business.
When we founded Arista Networks, we did not really want to buy our own servers for internal IT tasks such as hosting email. And we didn’t want to worry about data back-ups or remote access. We initially used a small, hosted email provider, but something went wrong every week. More than two years ago, we switched to Google Apps for all of our communication needs, and we have not had any problems since.
Our experience with Google Apps is very good. Email works great --- in particular the search function plus the integrated chat, and there is no SPAM. We get back-ups and world-wide remote access managed by Google. Document sharing is very useful. Basically everything just works as you would expect, and we don't have to worry about anything. We don't need a system administrator, even with a headcount of more than a hundred people.
My advice to every start-up is to use Google Apps. It saves you from having huge headaches, it is very inexpensive, and just a better system. We also use some other cloud services such as Salesforce.com for customer relationship management, Netsuite for our database and Amazon to host our website. Cloud computing works great for us. I would never buy another server to bring these functions in-house.
I would be happy to relay my experiences with Google Apps here at Arista and share three tips with you on:
- How to use cloud computing to focus on your core competency
- Ways to help employees increase productivity in a rapid growth environment
- How to recharge your business approach through constant innovations in Google Apps
Please join us for this LIVE event:
May 13, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT
