Today, we got the chance to sit down with Aprimo, an on-demand marketing automation company that has built their software business around scaling their own cloud infrastructure with VMware vCenter . Aprimo has optimized its offerings to scale with customer growth and leverage best-in-class hardware to match innovation in the software layers it develops. In this discussion, we found less need for discussing private vs. public cloud. Instead, we found more focus on performance and speed-to-market as key drivers for moving a virtualization strategy into personal cloud infrastructure reality. Sponsor The story of Aprimo starts with virtualization – and has led to the company defining the boundaries of its cloud offering and product architecture around the benefits of scaling resources on demand. Aprimo uses a Microsoft .Net three-tier architecture with MSSQL in the back-end. All of the three tiers (front-end, business logic, database) run in virtual containers that are monitored with vCenter. Performance is the question that Aprimo studied when bringing vendors on board. The company has relationships with 3Com, Cisco, and HP for the three key parts of the technology stack. vCenter joins these offerings together and offers the company quick response to new customer requests. Like many business, marketing can come in waves and this architecture is designed to scale around the unknown and to be agile enough to support the marketing calendar. Here is a diagram showing the core services VMware vCenter is focused on: We had the chance to explore the customer experience of build-your-own-cloud with John Gilmartin, Director of Product Marketing at VMware. We asked him if VMware sells clouds, or if instead its tool build clouds. What we found is that it is a bit of both. Like a data center itself, or a complex application, building your own cloud can be a multi-faceted event. Customers are using vCenter as a building block to manage the resources and enabling automation around business processes. By thinking of automation as the line in the sand between virtualization and cloud, we can easily see how connecting business processes focuses on the best place in harnessing on-demand resources for business benefit. Some of the areas of focus we the Aprimo team took on as the company to optimize its virtual resources into its cloud. Design and optimization of resource pools Database tier optimization and support new dynamic customer scaling Designing for performance with vendor evaluations Leveraging best practices from VMware on tuning and finding bottlenecks Processes for spinning up new users automatically across all resources Out of these focus areas, we found database scaling the most interesting to consider. It seems clear that as build-your-own-clouds grow, database performance, concurrency, and process integration are ripe for further optimization. What we learned from Aprimo and VMware vCenter is that launching a cloud infrastructure is a combination of virtualizing computing resources and designing the automation of the right business and technical processes. Reaching the stage of an effective cloud depends on how the team thinks about connecting software, sales, and infrastructure together as a process. Making a commitment to your own cloud can bring a company together – from sales manager to developer. This join can position an organization to win customers and grow the business due to an increase in the end to end agility of the organization. Is your business ready to cook up a cloud recipe of your own? Discuss

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Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launched Mediagazer , a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme , memeorandum , the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug . The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy. Sponsor As McCarthy notes in her announcement , “media business is in tumult” and this is a news vertical that lends itself to memetracking. Not only are there lots of interesting news stories from a large variety of sources, but these sources all tend to link to each other a lot, which makes it easier for the algorithm to find related stories. Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera’s team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn’t). Based on this experience, the team has “outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor.” It will be interesting to see how Rivera’s team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story – which is about both the tech and the media business – is featured on both sites . Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn’t feature a leaderboard , but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones . Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry. For more information about the role of the human editors at Techmeme, also have a look at our interview with Megan McCarthy . Discuss

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There’s a reason why vanity URLs, personalized profile pages and recommendation systems are so popular. To a customer or site visitor, there’s nothing more interesting than themselves. As the CEO of web tracking and sales conversion site Genius.com , former CMO of online meeting tool WebEx and author of Sales 2.0 for Dummies , David Thompson knows a thing or two about the customer psyche. Thompson spoke to ReadWriteWeb and explained why today’s landscape makes it the toughest in history to make a sale. And for once, it’s got nothing to do with the down economy. Sponsor He explained that in the past, sales people often made products like B2B software sound complicated in order for companies to add a perceived value and drive up prices. Says Thompson, “The web has tipped the scales in favor of the buyer. You can get on the phone with a sales rep and rather than being confused by product features, you’ve done all the research and your position as a buyer is strong. Today, a sales person has to assume transparency.” In order to close deals, sales people need to know as much as they possibly can about a potential customer. Genius.com works with companies to generate leads through web analytics, visitor profiling and contact / point-of-sales services. Some of the company’s clients include British Telecom , Ticket Leap and Jigsaw . The company builds profiles of site visitors and translates them into customer leads. Says Thompson, “While B2B and consumer-facing e-commerce are just starting to use the same type of analytics, the two are very different in that 50% of all sales are made via phone call, webinar or in-person meeting.” Thompson explains that few vendors above the $10,000 spend mark are willing to make purchases via a wholly automated system. He explains that startups targeting ad buyers, higher-end subscription sales and health-related consumers should take note. Some services simply can’t be streamlined to the point of complete automation. Thompson believes that using social tools to understand customers on a personal level is exactly how trust is established and sales are made. Rather than trying to mystify customers with product features, sales people are often required to connect on an emotional and personal level. It makes sense. Would you rather buy a product from a web form and real-time sales bot or from a sales person whose family might benefit from the commission? While it’s counter intuitive, Thompson suggests that maybe the way startups can stand out and offer customers added value is by removing some of the automation process. Services like EHarmony and Experts Exchange do a great job of streamlining with a personal touch. Meanwhile, companies like Zendesk offer startups a chance to access on-demand services from real people at affordable rates. Photo Credit: Eddy Van 3000 under the CC Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic License Discuss

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