The problem:

Lack of an off-the-shelf cloud-based business solution that companies can purchase and easily use like a utility.

The innovation:

Appcore developed a cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service “appliance” for businesses.

How they did it:

The product’s genesis can be traced back to Computility Inc., a company that Brian Donaghy co-founded in 1997 in Urbandale. Originally launched as Harvest Services Inc., it later rebranded itself as Computility and provided real-time Web-enabled services to small and medium-sized companies. Donaghy and his business partner sold Computility to Alliance Technologies Inc. in 2006.

Computility’s utility-computing approach was a precursor to what is now called cloud computing, Donaghy said.

“Cloud computing is the ability to buy and consume computer resources like a utility, on demand, just like you would buy phone, electricity, water or cable TV,” he said. “We always dreamed about doing cloud computing the way we’re doing it today. Technology progressed, and we took that expertise that we learned from Computility and applied it to Appcore.”

After more than two years of laboratory development, Appcore rolled out its flagship product, Appcore Onsite. “It really delivers, in a package, the business of cloud computing,” Donaghy said. “The only way we were able to do this at an early stage in the industry is that we leveraged the years of experience we have in the utility computing space. Major companies — for example, IBM, HP and Dell — have yet to release a product as complete as ours.”

Appcore’s product integrates all of the hardware and software needed for cloud computing-based business applications into a seamless package available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

“The problem with cloud computing is that it’s considered very complicated,” said Darryl Brown, a software development engineer who recently joined Appcore as senior vice president of global sales.

“Appcore has taken all that complexity and boiled it down to deliver it to give anyone with limited skills in that technology arena a revenue-generating platform. Or if I’m an enterprise, to allow me to do the complete opposite of that, which is to leverage the platform to run all of my current in-house servers – to take that software implementation and move it to what is like a modern mainframe in many ways.”

Appcore occupies most of the 12th floor of the Financial Center; it also operates a factory at the Riverpoint West office complex, where it assembles the hardware and software components. Appcore has sales offices on the East Coast, a small research and development facility in South Africa and a global support center in Chennai, India. The company is in the process of opening a global support center in the Philippines as well.

“We’re moving a lot more into the enterprise space, but our real niche is with telephone companies, data centers and fiber-optic rings,” Donaghy said.

The company’s customer base includes hundreds of telephone companies around the world. “So these are large companies that have networks of infrastructure in place that are accustomed to delivering data services, and this is a new data service they can deliver through that infrastructure,” Donaghy said.

What’s your key to being innovative?

“It’s having a very clear understanding of what customers need, but before they even realize that they need it.” – Brian Donaghy, founder, Appcore LLC