The other side of legal is the corporate legal side, more of a defensive play: What corporate attorney wouldn’t pay X dollars a month or a year to have their website archived by a disinterested third party service? There are frivolous lawsuits that major corporations get two or three or five or ten times a week where your website was supposed to have said this. They want to know for sure when it said that. And there are other ramifications of that inside the corporation: There’s the internal Intranet and lawsuits from employees about accusations of different prejudicial behavior. Having a disinterested third party that could archive that information would be a value there.

DMR: I can access your service from anywhere in the world over the web interface. And I can issue work orders and monitor the site or give me information about that from anywhere. I don’t need any kind of infrastructure. This is what generally people say makes it to a Cloud service. What do you think changed in terms of how this service gets used, how it’s applied, or how it’s bought, compared to an on-demand model?

Pete Grillo: I think it lowers the barrier of entry considerably when customers have nothing to worry about except just being browser based. The other, as you described as “on-demand”, is very oppressive. It requires orders of magnitude more complexity. The benefits of Cloud are obvious: I can fix bugs, you don’t even have to know – you didn’t know there was a bug there, you didn’t know there was a fix there, all you know is you didn’t hit that bug because I fixed it. New features appear and it’s like wow, it does this now. That’s great. I’m happy. I get sort of re-enthused, revalidated that I made the right decision, so that’s all goodness.

The badness of that is – back to the Web 2.0 – anybody and everybody can create an application. You just need $50.00 and Amazon Web Services to create an application. People just are used to not paying for it. When we had massive installs and you get the new set of DVD’s and you have to have an IT guy do the patch every Tuesday there’s this feeling I’ve gotten more.

DMR: That’s interesting. So the guy that you had to come into your office and had to update your servers was obviously seen as a cost, but now, looking back, it was almost like a value because you saw the guy, a physical person, working for your money.