The third winner of the Art of Disruption challenge is Webscale, an e-commerce infrastructure startup. (For an overview of this challenge, go here: Challenge 1 Overview.)
Webscale was founded in 2013 to develop a cloud-based infrastructure platform for e-commerce. Backed by $18 million in VC funding, Webscale is led by Sonal Puri, who previously served as CMO for Aryaka Networks.
I recently wrote about Webscale for Network World, naming them a Hot Business Continuity startup to watch. We put Webscale’s VP of Marketing, Andrew Humber, on the hot seat to learn why Webscale could be the next big thing in e-commerce infrastructure.
(Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.)
Startup50: Why is e-commerce infrastructure a sector that is ripe for disruption?
Andrew Humber, Webscale: Static, dedicated hosting environments are a thing of the past, especially for e-commerce businesses. Some of these hosting providers have begun offering cloud migration and hosting services, but these are typically either to another static datacenter (or “private” cloud), or a managed and heavily marked up public cloud experience. This approach is still bound by many of the same limitations with regards to performance, availability, security, and cost of ownership.
Startup50: Give us an overview of the market opportunity for you.
Webscale: The total e-commerce market in 2017 was $2 trillion, growing at a 22% rate YoY. The overall infrastructure spend for e-commerce businesses is about $20 billion, calculated (conservatively) at 1% of the revenue. This is the market disruption opportunity for Webscale.
Startup50: Why is legacy infrastructure a problem for e-commerce businesses?
Webscale: The public cloud is the natural home for e-commerce, with a utility-based model that is well suited to the rapidly changing demands placed on e-commerce sites during peak sales periods, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Many e-commerce site owners know that a move to the public cloud is the right way to run their business, yet with no support from their existing providers, to drive the cloud migration, it is highly challenging endeavor. Moving to the cloud while ensuring 100% uptime, fast page loads, and robust security, can be tricky.
Startup50: What are e-commerce companies doing in the meantime, then?
Webscale: Many are trying to move to the public cloud, but it’s not as easy as service providers tell them it will be. Cloud migration poses unique challenges in ensuring 100% uptime when demand planning and forecasting are not accurate. This is often the case especially during Holiday Season/Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
Another problem is security. As online stores migrate to the public cloud, the attack surface area of applications increases significantly. A malicious attack can result in significant damage to a storefront’s brand, revenue, and customer loyalty. Robust cybersecurity measures must be adopted to protect the business and its customers.
E-commerce businesses often fail or end up going back to legacy systems if cloud migrations are not successful.
Startup50: In your experience, what is the main reason that these migrations fail?
Webscale: An acute cloud skills gap makes it hard for businesses to drive a successful migration and manage the infrastructure afterwards. This skills gap is a problem that is accelerating due to the extraordinary growth the segment is experiencing (only industry to see double digit growth year over year). There simply aren’t enough people with expertise in the cloud to make cloud migrations and management seamless from an in-house IT department, especially for businesses that are headquartered outside major metropolitan areas.
Startup50: How does Webscale solve the cloud skills gap and related infrastructure problems?
Webscale: With more than 700 storefronts in the public cloud, Webscale offers the only cloud hosting and management solution that delivers 100% uptime, powerful security, and high performance. Webscale’s solution also helps you migrate to any public cloud environment, so you can realize the true benefits of the cloud – extreme flexibility, infinite capacity, predictive scalability, and up to 75% lower costs by having a system that is always right-sized, so you only pay for what you use.
Webscale offers automated, real-time, and predictive auto-scaling, capable of forecasting traffic surges and scaling ahead of demand automatically to ensure 100% uptime, at all times.
We accelerate sites and applications with in-built intelligent caching in its data plane, integration with globally deployed cloud CDN caches close to global users, advanced page and content optimization techniques, caching of HTML pages and content for anonymous sessions, and configuring third-party assets to be deferred or downloaded in parallel.
Startup50: You mentioned that you have “powerful security.” Tell us about that.
Webscale: We have the only platfrom that offers custom 360-degree protection for your e-commerce application infrastructure – against traffic-based attacks or malware insertions at the backend, eliminating the need to invest in premium content delivery networks (CDNs) or web application firewalls (WAFs) that generically provide security at the edge.
Our application-aware WAF provides robust protection against application-specific attacks. Webscale has security features to protect against DDoS attacks and prevents bypassing the Webscale security layer to target the backend directly.
Webscale also has File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) and Scanning capabilities that get alerted to any malicious changes in the application or data servers, mitigating the threat of zero-day exploits.
Startup50: You also recently rolled out a new bot protection feature, correct?
Webscale: That’s right. Cloud Bot Manager protects e-commerce applications from being hijacked by malicious bots. It proactively identifies suspicious attack patterns or browsing behavior and mitigates malicious bots through reputation, behavior analysis, and machine learning techniques. Cloud Bot Manager also prevents malicious bots from stealing sensitive information (like credit card details) and scraping valuable content for the competition.
Startup50: What is your #1 differentiator vs. competitors?
Webscale: Our service sits in the data path, between our customers’ storefronts and their users. As a result, we see everything coming in and out of the application. It gives us more insight into website traffic (good and bad) than any other comparable solution on the market, and that, in turn, enables us to carry out rapid, often automated control decisions that directly improve uptime, performance, and security.
So, in short, our #1 differentiator is our technology stack, our flexibility in deployment (any cloud, any e-commerce platform, any CDN etc.), and the ease of use that we can provide to e-commerce business owners so that they no longer need to worry about their infrastructure, instead they can just focus on their business.
