1. Presentation to the IAB Meeting Karuna P Joshi June 13, 2013
NSF I-Corps program
Presentation to the IAB Meeting
Karuna P Joshi
June 13, 2013

2. NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program
Set of activities and programs that prepare researchers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory.
Teaches grantees to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and offers entrepreneurship training to student participants.
Eligibility
PI Must have an active NSF award
Must have I-Corps team in place at initial contact

3. Curriculum
Based on hypothesis-driven business-model discovery (pioneered by Stanford and Steve Blank)
Focuses on addressing market risk
Requires getting out of the lab to meet potential clients
Mandatory for all I-Corps participants
Attend introductory 3-day workshop
Participate in 5 follow-on webinars with team presentations/ interactions
Attend 2 days of demos/lessons learned

4. I-Corps Teams I-Corps Teams have three essential members
Principal investigator
Entrepreneurial lead
Mentor
Two rounds of interviews for acceptance
NSF Project Managers
I-Corps training team
Highly competitive (acceptance rate ~ 18%)

5. UMBC Team Members Entrepreneur Lead : Dr. Karuna P Joshi
Research Assistant Professor, UMBC
Product Idea based on EL’s PhD Research
Research Focus : Cloud Services automation, Cloud Usability (with NIST)
Primary Investigator: Dr. Yelena Yesha
Professor , UMBC
Research Focus : Personalized Medicine, Cloud Computing, Databases
Advisor to EL
Team Mentor: Lily Bengfort
Founder of CenGen, VP DRS Technologies
Mentor at Path Forward Center,
Founding Member of Howard County Technology Council
Trainer in the ACTIVATE program

6. Our product: Cloud Services Broker
Initial Idea: Application to automatically discover, acquire and consume Cloud based services.
Over 100 potential Customers talked to
Size of the opportunity
Total Available Market - $240B by 2020
Served Available Market - Federal agencies,
International Agencies and Higher Education sector
Federal Agencies (annual $10 billion by 2018).
Initial Target (For minimum viable product)
Estimate CSB 10% of Market ~ $100 million

7. Business Model Canvas Free/Advertisements Pay per Use model
Procure services that best match data, security, compliance
Reduce acquisition time by 75%
Machine readable SLA for live feed of performance.
Manage services on private cloud
Automate Negotiation
Develop MVP
Set up contracts with cloud providers, consumers
UMBC Tech Incubator
Federal agencies
Industry
Defense Contractor
Target customers free initial use
Bundle services
Federal agencies
Provisioning tool for private cloud
Commercial cloud providers
Internet
Mobile App
Cloud
Infrastructure
Developers
Free/Advertisements
Pay per Use model
Subscription based model
Consulting Services
Infrastructure costs
Developer costs

8. First workshop in New York
What we Did
Lectures on Business Canvas and it’s components
Instructed to interview 15 potential customers in 2 days
Stepped outside our comfort zone – cold called companies in New York, talked to people at the coffee shop.
What we Found
Security was a top concern for customers
Customers ready to pay more for security/branded clouds
Increased our customer base to include Healthcare/Pharma, Financial sector - Organizations with compliance/regulatory requirements
Cloud Identity Management big business (Security/Privacy)

9. Follow-up sessions in DC
Got out of the building to interview customers
Contacted key players in Federal agencies, cloud providers, other companies
Attended DoD cloud Assurance conference – gave us key insight on customer expectations
Weekly updates to the teaching staff

10. Follow-up sessions: What we Found
Security/Privacy key concern for customers
Revised Value Propositions based on customer interviews
Security risk assessment
Cloud cost assessment
Removed a key value proposition “Automate Negotiation”
Large organizations have mature procurement staff.
Focused our targeted market to Federal agencies, International Agencies and Higher Education sector
Determined customer acquisition cost
Customer Archetype diagram, channels and revenue streams

11. Customer Ecosystem Diagram
CEO/CIO
Chief Acquisition Officer
Contracting Officers
Procurement staff
Program Managers
Chief Technology Officer
Cloud Infrastructure Manager
End User
Services /
Software Manager
CISO (Security Manager)
OSDBUs, SADBUs, SBLO
Final Authority/ Cloud Strategy
Influencer
Decision Maker
Service consumer
Our Customer Archetype

12. Business Canvas

13. Insight There is a market need for Cloud Service Brokers
Customers want Independent / Neutral companies for this role
Market in a flux due to ambiguous definition of what a broker should do
Some customers want the broker to do everything – negotiate SLAs, contract oversight etc.
Others are still working on a cloud strategy.
Cloud Providers currently not interested in tying up cloud brokers
Trying to get the “cloud broker” functionality within their offerings .

14. Links
Technical video on Youtube