GreenButton

» see greenbutton.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I rent other people's machines by the hour, the way anyone doing computer vision work does, and I have never once bought a rack. GreenButton sold that arrangement to software companies rather than to engineers like me, which is why the name never came anywhere near my terminal. It is in here for the problem it was built out of.

Scott Houston was Weta Digital's technology chief during the Lord of the Rings work, and in the final weeks of the trilogy he needed more rendering capacity than the building had. There was nowhere in 2003 to rent a thousand processors for six weeks, so Weta spent several million dollars buying a thousand computers it would not need afterward. That is a very expensive way to solve a temporary problem, and the person who signs for it does not forget.

He founded InterGrid in Wellington in 2006 to sell the missing option: small customers renting access to job processors they could not justify owning. In 2011 the company took the name of its flagship product and became GreenButton, and joined the Microsoft Partner Network the same year. Revenue that year was 1.5 million dollars, which is small, but the thing it was selling barely existed yet.

In December 2011 it opened a US headquarters in Palo Alto and a sales office in Seattle while keeping the engineering in New Zealand. For a Wellington company whose founding anecdote involved a film trilogy, the American end was unglamorous business development.

~ the case file ~

~ the button ~

The product was close to literal. A software vendor added a GreenButton to its own desktop application, and when a user pressed it the job that would have taken a laptop a week went off to a data center and came back billed by the hour. The customer never saw a cluster and never had a sysadmin in the conversation.

The buyer was therefore the software vendor, and the person pressing the button was only the vendor's customer, which was both the clever part and the quiet ceiling on the business. GreenButton announced work with GNS Science of New Zealand and the American Stillwater Group in June 2012 for seismic processing, which is the sort of job that is enormous and rare at once, the shape that owned hardware handles worst.

~ the pixar year ~

The high point came in January 2012, when Pixar put RenderMan on demand through GreenButton and Windows Azure. A Wellington company of a few dozen people was now the billing layer between Pixar's renderer and Microsoft's data centers.

Microsoft announced the acquisition on 2 May 2014 and did not disclose a price. The existing service closed to new customers immediately and the technology went into Azure, where it later shipped under the name Azure Batch. The team and the infrastructure stayed in New Zealand. Dave Fellows, the company's chief technology officer, said at the time that Microsoft liked the brand and that it would stick around for at least the medium term. greenbutton.com serves 114 bytes today.

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