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W. Marc Bernsau
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
CTP co-founder Greendale finds next venture in cloud computing
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With a pilot who has seeded these clouds before, a technology consulting startup is hoping to make cloud computing rain money. That pilot is Chris Greendale, who flew this path as a co-founder of Cambridge Technology Partners in the early 1990s, building a 4,500-person powerhouse. Now, Greendale is hoping Cloud Technology Partners will get in on the ground floor of enterprise adoption of the cloud with a plan to help midsize enterprises move applications off their servers and into the nebulous Internet.
“Enterprises usually come last with new technology,” Greendale said. “What that means is there is always a consulting opportunity with a new wave.”
Greendale has ridden two technology waves to staggering heights. Cambridge Technology Partners focused on helping businesses adopt client-server technologies. In 1997, CTP pulled in $850 million in revenue and had a market cap of approximately $5 billion.
That year Greendale left CTP to catch the next wave: e-commerce. He founded Breakaway Solutions Inc., with a mission to help enterprises move their products onto the Internet. Breakaway also went public, becoming a $7 billion behemoth before the dotcom bubble burst.
What Boston-based CloudTP is doing right now, barely a year after being founded, is helping some early beta customers move noncritical applications to the cloud to validate its return on investment from cost savings. By the end of this year, Greendale hopes to have a half-dozen or so paid early clients, each with a contract that runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. “The mature market is probably coming next year,” he said. “I see our company as a little early, but not much.”
After the first year shakeout period, Greendale hopes to have an ongoing roster of clients that could bring into the company as much as $1 million each per year.
That target may be the hardest nut to crack, according to Jeff Kaplan of ThinkStrategies Inc. in Wellesley. While he agrees that there is tremendous opportunity in the cloud space, the idea that a consultancy can consistently nab million-dollar deals doesn’t make sense in today’s razor-thin-margin world. “It is a commoditized market, where people can find these consulting skills competitively on the web,” Kaplan said. “This is disrupting the entire consulting industry — companies like Accenture and Deloitte and KPMG are being challenged by this new competitive environment — because the high-priced consultants of the past are a thing of the past.”
Greendale has what it takes to create a winning firm, said Gene Barton, an attorney for Pepper Hamilton LLP in Boston. Barton has worked with Greendale for more than a decade, first at CTP then at Breakaway.
“Chris is a magnet for people. He’ll attract opportunities, and he’ll attract people,” Barton said. And people are the key, according to Barton. Consulting, he said, “is a lot like the law business — you will rise and fall on the quality of people you have. The key to (CTP) was the recruiting, training and retention of people.”
Right now, those people number just five full-timers, and Greendale said he is not worried about sticking to any rigid growth plan that has him hiring a certain number of people. One of the things he will do differently this time around is to rely more on partnerships to execute sales and drive business, which means he won’t need the massive sales forces he had at CTP and Breakaway.
Even though the staff sizes won’t be as large as at those two success stories, Greendale thinks the market potential is bigger than both.
“I’ve never seen a wave as big as this,” he said. “This is a fundamental shift in the way computing is going to be done for the rest our lifetime.”
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