Russ:  Hi, I’m Russ Capper and this is BusinessMakers USA coming to you from Seattle, Washington and my guest is Michael Fraser, Chief Architect and CEO of early stage Infinite Ops; Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael:  Thanks for having me Russ.

Russ:  You bet.  Tell us about Infinite Ops.

Michael:  Infinite Ops was founded to solve a problem in the IT world which would allow for us to provide turnkey Cloud solutions that can be used universally on multiple different Cloud providers; so you can pick your solution and you can then deploy it on the cloud of your which really gives you Cloud freedom.

Russ:  Really interesting because obviously Cloud is, I mean utilizing it is of the utmost importance these days but I guess it’s gotten fairly complicated because there are very different.

Michael:  Yeah, so our whole goal is to take the complexity out of Cloud; make it as simple as for the IT Department or the IT search provider to easily and quickly deploy solutions in the cloud, whatever they may be, and then be able to actually quickly scale as they need to on whatever cloud they decide to choose.

Russ:  Okay, when you look at the various Cloud offerings are they very different than each other?

Michael:  They are but what we’ve done is streamlined the process and so we can provide the same experience on the different clouds because we’ve put the best practices and the architecture as similar as possible on each Cloud to make sure that the experience is the same on whatever Cloud you choose.

Russ:  Okay, as I said when I introduced you it’s early stage; how early is it and sort of tell us about the company as it exists today.

Michael:  We started the company in December of 2015 and we’ve just gotten our first customer on last month.

Russ:  Oh wow was there a big celebration after that?

Michael:  There was but big is relative.  We were excited about it but we’ve been working so hard on just finishing out features and getting solutions into our marketplace that has been our first and foremost priority and then customers is right in line with that.

Russ:  Okay.  I’m interested, when you show up today do you have to really do a lot of explaining as to what you do and why they need you or are generally are they sitting there ready willing and able to take in somebody who knows what they’re doing with the cloud?

Michael:  We started out as a workspaces platform and what that means is it was based upon different solutions like Citrix and remote desktop services and then we said we can take the same architecture that we have and how we’ve built everything and apply that to any type of solution that requires Cloud services and software combined together.  And so now what we’re doing is we’ve built a marketplace out to provide different various solutions beyond workspaces so now we can have a full marketplace to provide an ecosystem of solutions for these partners to easily and quickly deploy.  From an educational standpoint we are early, not just early stage but early to the market and so education is paramount now for our potential customers to be able to get them in to our platform.

Russ:  What’s your status of being funded or are you boot strapping?  What’s the plan?

Michael:  So up to now, up to this point we’ve been boot strapped and we’re working on funding at this point.  So the whole goal was we had to get some customers in, had to finish out our product offering and then we’ve actually fine-tuned our platform and our messaging over the course of our beta.  And so now that we’ve gone into getting our first production customers into the platform we’re now at a place where we’re now actively looking for funding because we are bringing in customers from our pipeline.

Russ:  I sort of come from the real world and I know there’s some people that don’t but to me having a revenue stream makes a huge difference in fund raising.  I mean just seeing that somebody’s willing to pay you for what you’ve got.  So congratulations on being there and hopefully you have continued success.  I know you have some sort of unique background that got you here with an exposure to high technology, share that with us.

Michael:   I started out in the Air Force when I was 18, worked on F15 and F22 armament systems, so electronics and weapons systems.  And then I moved into the guard and worked on combat com, we dropped large network infrastructures in the middle of nowhere and hooked them up via satellite.  While I was in the Air Force I also started my first company when I was 19, which was a mailbox store and a computer repair shop, and then have had multiple technology companies since then.

Russ:  Okay, so you’ve always been aimed at the entrepreneur sector for sure, right?

Michael:  I think I have that bug in me.

Russ:  Okay, cool.  So before I let you go share with us where you’d like the company to be 3 or 4 years from now.

Michael:  I would love for the company to either be acquired or be disruptive enough to have a large following, or a combination of both.  We’ve already gotten an acquisition offer earlier this year and so we turned it down.  And so we know what we have is disruptive, we know that it’s something that people want to acquire.  Again, we’re a little bit early to the market and so getting our customer base built out and then being able to build out more and more features in our ecosystem of solutions is all paramount to our exit strategy, but an acquisition or a merger would be great 3 years from now.

Russ:  Well good luck with that and thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

Michael:  Thanks Russ, appreciate it.

Russ:  You bet.  All right, and that wraps up my discussion with Michael Fraser, Founder, Chief Architect and CEO of early stage Infinite Ops.  And this is BusinessMakers USA.