On any network, anywhere, we want to be connected to all of our tools. Right?

Cloud Unified Communications, from the enterprise down to the small business isn’t just about an advanced set of tools and features that work when we are plugged into the office.

Rather it is about a set of tools that just plain work…regardless of where we are sitting.

Mobility for Unified Communications is now widely available and it is something that your business should be looking at implementing.

But not all mobility applications are created equal. So it may be helpful to have a little insight as to what makes for a truly useful Mobile toolbox.

Considering Mobility as part of your Unified Communications Strategy? Here are the top items that should be on your shopping list.

Compatibility: Which platforms does the mobile application best support? Given the diverse set of tools running Windows, Android and iOS, does the mobile application support all (or at least the required) platforms?

Ubiquity: People struggle with working with vastly different platforms. Always preferring more consistent experience between their various devices. Just because an application offers mobility, is it user-friendly where learning to use the mobile solution isn’t a “Re-Learning” process but rather an extension of what the user all ready knows?

Functionality: Does the mobile tools provide similar functionality to the full version? Mobility doesn’t have to mean a great compromise. Tools like Presence and Unity should be available on your mobile application. Further advanced applications like web collaboration and even high definition video should likely be part of the mobile capabilities.

Transferability: Is moving between your “Wired-In” office and your mobile tool box as easy as it should be? A good mobile application for Unified Communication should allow you to go from your office to your car to the coffee shop seamlessly.

Support: As more applications are running on more devices support becomes more and more important for use. Make sure that the chosen UC platform has a well supported mobile application. As we all know, mobile applications pop up everyday. When running a business the application needs to work everyday, or you have a toy, not a Unified Communication solution.

Real mobility should be one of the keys in choosing your Unified Communication platform. But make sure to pay attention to the details because not all Mobility is created equal.

How mobile is your organization?

For leading tools and the best partner program for Cloud in the industry, click here.

Let’s be very clear, it is not.

Cloud for all intents and purposes has been around for more than 20 years.

Really what has changed is the availability of bandwidth.

Technologies such as virtual applications and Cloud-Based Voice over IP (VoIP) could have been done long ago. The problem was the horsepower needed to handle the data traffic created by the usage would have brought networks to their knees.

The good news is that the bandwidth is now widely available.

A T1 is now like dial up once was with 20+ meg fiber connections pouring into businesses everywhere.

So with network issues now more or less out of the way, the excuses to not put your solutions in the cloud are becoming less and less valid.

Leaving you to ask yourself, what is your Cloud Strategy?

If you are a business, the opportunity to move applications such as CRM, ERP and Communications to the cloud can provide an instant source of security, availability and mobility to your systems that may have at one time eluded your business.

While security is often pointed at as an issue related to cloud applications, the bottom line is that most cloud technology providers have more rigorous security policies and engineers than the average business trying to manage applications on their own servers.

In terms of availability, most cloud applications run with high availability well above 99%. If and when the application goes down, the provider becomes the support and with specialists and dedicated resources to work on the issues, the downtime is often very brief. Further most cloud providers ofter some type of remuneration should the system go down.

Lastly, the mobility piece is becoming more and more pertinent with the proliferation of bring your own device. But whether it is on a personal device or a company issued one, the importance of a companies personnel having secure access to information is key. Cloud applications make access far easy from mobile devices and locations.

For the IT Var, Integrator or Service Provider the growth of cloud also has an impact.

As more businesses embrace a cloud strategy, it means their purchases and partnerships will be directed toward companies that offer the technology they need.

If your organization has long made its “Hay” by selling large hardware deployments containing Servers, Routers and Switches and other peripheral devices to manage and run all of their core applications and computing needs; then change is coming, and fast!

For Resellers everywhere the question from their customers and prospects is going to be why should I partner with you as I move to the cloud?

The answer will have to be because we (you) understand the needs and requirements for a cloud deployment.

Moreover, because you have the expertise and the partnerships with cloud services providers that answer to the needs to businesses everywhere.

Cloud has provided options for businesses and opportunities for VARS, but with options comes competition and with opportunity comes cost.

Nevertheless, no plan is not a viable option anymore.

Businesses and Resellers alike, it’s time to ask yourself this question…What is our Cloud Strategy?

Ready to learn more about building a high powered business with cloud based unified communications. Visit us here to find out how.

NYSE set out to create a new model for “customer service and business empowerment.” Moving to the cloud was essential to create a “virtual capital markets community” with fast access to global markets, information and partnerships.

NYSE supports over 2.5 million transactions per day, at more than 80 trading locations around the world. That’s 42 times more transactions than eBay completes in a year.

Brokers, investment banks, hedge funds and financial firms count on NYSE to provide large scale trading, data and network services with no downtime. In the U.S., NYSE exchanges transact $70.8 billion every day.

NYSE Technologies Senior Vice President Feargal O’Sullivan described to me how they built a flexible “market-neutral platform“ for the industry’s unique needs.

Clients need real-time pricing and network connectivity to global markets. They also need historic data for predictive analytics and market simulations. And while strong IT capabilities have been a competitive advantage, they are becoming too costly.

Why A Community Cloud?

Trading clients trust NYSE because it understands their regulatory, data protection and operating challenges. That’s why it made sense for NYSE to architect the Capital Markets Community Cloud.

The Cloud offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) only to the NYSE community. As a result, clients can downsize their on premise data centers to purchase cloud services instead. The platform uses VMware technologies and EMC storage in a private network isolated from Internet cyber threats.

The platform’s IsaaS offers elastic computing and storage. The PaaS offers application programming interfaces (APIs) for clients to feed market data into proprietary analytics and simulation algorithms.

The Community Cloud’s “nearly infinite scale” is essential for NYSE’s real-time market data service called SuperFeed. SuperFeed provides direct microsecond connectivity between trading venues like New York and Tokyo. It streams live raw data feeds as high as 8 Gb per second for real-time transactions.

For investors trading NYSE-listed stocks at any venue, SuperFeed delivers “best quoted” trade prices in real time as required by SEC NMS regulations.

Today’s financial IT networks are overtaxed. So the Capital Markets Community Cloud was specifically designed to be high performance, ultra-flexible and affordable for any size firm.

And users like Millennium Partners and Pico Quantitative Trading are excited about how they can adapt more quickly to fast-moving markets.

The Cost Benefit for Compliance

With NYSE’s cloud services, brokers and firms can diversify their offerings without large upfront IT costs.

Smaller firms in particular might also benefit from a reduced cost of compliance.

The financial services sector is heavily regulated. The high cost of compliance can erode a firm’s margin and growth and even put smaller firms at risk.

Since NYSE’s operations are already SEC-compliant, some client users can maintain a smaller footprint to manage their own compliance. According to Feargal O’Sullivan, smaller customers who trade on a limited number of NYSE-supported markets “could potentially save the cost of having their own compliance and reporting staff entirely.”

For small prominent firms like J. Streicher and Sons, New York Stock Exchange member for more than a century, the Community Cloud can make it easier to diversify trading services across asset classes, venues and geographies.

For T.D. Ameritrade, NYSE’s Community Cloud also provides disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has become a popular use case for the cloud. Since NYSE’s data center and network are SEC-regulated, clients are assured that their application environments are secure and will pass regulatory review. T.D. Ameritrade and others can use the savings to buy value-added services around market data, market access and secure financial networking.

As NYSE Technologies CEO Jon Robson pointed out, the “real opportunity” of the Community Cloud is “to rebuild a 21^st century version of the financial services community. The whole operating model can change because of this.”

The transformation lies in clients partnering to create new value within the community. For example, firms can link products and content to innovate new services around risk management or adaptive trading. It’s already happening. NYSE plans to capture these innovations in an online store, like a financial services iTunes.

As Feargal O’Sullivan summed it up, “This is the start of a marketplace, where people get to pick, a la carte, the services and capabilities they need, pay for them on an agile basis, with all of the promise the cloud brings to other industries.”

The Capital Markets Community Cloud model looks ideal for other regulated industries like healthcare.

NYSE has pioneered a whole new way to balance the flexibility of cloud with the rigors of compliance.

There is no need to build your own cloud, we can do that for you. (Says Everyone!)

These days it seems that there are endless options for resellers to white label if they are looking to get into the cloud game.

To name a few…

• Storage and Backup
• Voice and Unified Communications
• Managed Wireless
• Email, Outlook, Exchange
• Customer Relationship Management

And the list goes on.

You’ll hear lines like, no cost or experience required, or low (no) cost branding.

All of which are quite lucrative.

But remember. When there is no barrier to entry, then there is well, no barrier to entry.

Leaving you to ask this questions…

If I can do this for no cost or low cost, what is to stop others?

The answer to that question should be N-O-T-H-I-N-G!!!

However, don’t let the path of least resistance ruin your perspective on white-labeling cloud solutions.

To build a highly scalable and secure cloud environment the costs can be astronomical.

Easily in the millions of dollars.

So there are companies out there that are building these solutions with you, the partner in mind.

But before you go down a road with any of these partners you have to ask yourself a few questions such as…

• Who are the competitors to this technology?
• Who else is currently selling this platform?
• Are there substantial barriers to entry?
• If no barriers to entry will the market be over saturated?
• If there are substantial costs to get started, how much do we need to sell to be profitable?
• Can we support this service?
• If we cannot support the service, can the provider?
• Why is “White Labeling” important here?

This isn’t nearly all of the questions that you should ask, but this is a sampling of what a VAR should be thinking about before jumping into a partnership with a white label cloud service.

The last question is also key because many partners think they want to White Label a cloud offering when really what they need is the right partner.

The case for white label is most often because the entity that the solution is being procured from is also selling to the customer directly. In those cases you should probably ask yourself another question…

Do you think this company is really going to work hard to see our company succeed?

Your guess is as good as mine, but my immediate reaction would be No! Why would they?

The good news is there are sound companies that are 100% dedicated to the partner channel that offer a great set of cloud services to resell or white label.

This is where your research and careful consideration come into play.

Before you choose a partner in cloud, make sure it makes sense for your business.

Otherwise you’ll be selling the same tools as everyone else, trying to make pennies when their are dollars to be made.

So do you have a cloud partner that understands what matters do you?

Here is a place to start!

Everything seems to be rebranded/ cobranded/ reinvented/ paint jobbed as a ‘Cloud’.

Many questions are being raised, e.g. will a SaaS cloud float at a higher level than a PaaS cloud and will they all float on top of a IaaS cloud? Do they float or do they integrate?

Navigating your business in all of these clouds can become difficult if you do not have a good radar system in place. One that would detect the BS (Business Sense – of course) a mile away.

Terminology is always a good way to start making sense of things. Unfortunately it was exactly at the very 1st term where I got stuck!

What do you call a group of clouds?

I sat down with Fred McCloud and we started Googling the collective noun for clouds:

• a cumulonimbus of clouds < Cumulonimbus clouds belong to the Clouds with Vertical Growth group. They are generally known as thunderstorm clouds. Cumulonimbus clouds are associated with heavy rain, snow, hail, lightning, and tornadoes.

• a sky of clouds < beautiful to look at. But will they bring rain?

• a vagueness of clouds < are they or are they not clouds? Maybe just fog?

• an accumulation of clouds < they all just kind of drifted together. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

• a soufflé of clouds < looks yummy. Hard to get right.

• a pageant of clouds < looks fabulous, but can they do the job?

• a cling of clouds < like a bad relationship that does not want to let go? But what if you are ready to move on?

Our favorite : a storm of clouds < you just KNOW that things are going to happen FAST!

But not so fast that you don’t have time to close the windows and shutters. And if you are a farmer, you will have your lands plowed and seeds planted. Ready for the rain.

But back to business. With this storm of clouds on the horizon and you preparing your business to the best of your abilities, where would you get the best information to ensure that you are making the best decisions

This post is a follow-up to an earlier article published on SCN by Schalk Viljoen , What Do You Call A Group of Clouds? 

What does skateboarding teach us about innovation? Rodney Mullen gave a goofy and slightly irreverent TED Talk on the innovative culture of the skateboarding community. He lists the three factors necessary to create a vibrant community centered on creativity and innovation. 

Experimentation

People need to feel free to create without fear of failure. Mullen remarks how humbling it is to practice new tricks, fall, and get back up again. In an emotional moment he tells us about how he only considers having won a championship once. After that he was just defending his title, and that caused him to take less risk and innovate less. It wasn’t until he saw the context of freestyle skateboarding disrupted by street terrains that he was forced to adapt and evolve his style. Dealing with these innovator’s dilemmas continues to be an important balancing act for our businesses.

Peer Recognition

Innovators are not just motivated by money and fame. Over time these extrinsic motivations become less and less important. We create because we want to feel like we are contributing to a community of our peers. This importance of peer recognition is seeing resurgence in the workplace. Just ask Shopify, a startup that recently adopted a completely peer-driven compensation model.

Tight Feedback Loops

If you’re still on your skateboard chances are your last trick was successful; if you find yourself on the floor holding your knee, not so much. In the corporate world we rarely have such tight feedback loops. It can take a long time before we know whether a new approach will yield results. You can drastically reduce the time to understanding by adopting a data-driven mentality. Analytics are crucial in measuring the success of business innovations.

It’s not just the skaters who are known for innovation in the skating community. Board manufacturer WeFunk is changing the way their designers and suppliers collaborate. By adopting cloud solutions they can focus on delivering amazing skating experiences around the world, instead of worrying about maintaining servers and IT infrastructure.

What do you think creates a culture of innovation? Send a tweet to @abontech to continue the conversation.

The interview is in 4 video sections:

A new master architecture is emerging, combing cloud, mobile, social and advanced integration, which will help organizations move into the future, to what Saugatuck see as the Boundary-free Enterprise™.

What is the Past, Present and Future of Cloud Adoption?

Saugatuck sees a move from point / discrete solutions, islands of automation to solving more robust corporate wide business problems.

This transition has been evolving over the last 5-7 years.

There are 3 phases:

• CRM, Social  collaboration > highest area of cloud based adoption

• HCM > Transition in upper ME and large enterprises > sharp edge of the wedge introducing cloud solutions to large enterprises

• Core financials systems (systems of record) >  there are a number of SMB solutions, but now there are also credible alternatives for larger enterprises

Cloud Vuying Patterns, Customer Benefits and Business Value

During this transition from point solutions to addressing more complex business problems, companies are starting to recognize that cloud computing is not only about costs saving, but about generating better business value and rethinking underlying business processes in a modern way. I.e. not simply replicating the business processes of the past.

The move to loosely coupled architectures provide customers with a greater choice in the pace change of adoption of new, e.g. cloud based, solutions.

Some can completely replace their systems, but for some the benefit of a loosely coupled systems is that they can expand to new or replace systems for discrete functional areas

Towards end of the decade maybe all systems will be cloud based

Summary: 3 Flavors of Cloud Computing

The Flavors of Cloud Computing

• Highly integrated
• Single vendor multi- cross functional delivered through loosely couples architecture
• Multi vendor multi- cross functional delivered through loosely couples architecture

What Should Customers Look for in a Winning Cloud Solution?

• Rich functional capabilities + platform capabilities and complementary tools that are helping to revolutionize enterprise software, especially:

• Social > embedded into the workflow
• Mobile > mobile 1st perspective ofapplication consumption
• Advanced analytics
• + Integration

• All are the new master architecture …  Cloud + social + mobile + advanced analytics + Integration

• Delivering transition from enterprise IT to the Boundary-free Enterprise™.

In Summary : Latest Trends of Cloud Adoption

• This is an exciting time, with innovation across so many dimensions.

• Saugatuck is seeing CIOs being more excited than they have been in the past 10 – 20 years

• Saugatuck see this as a Renaissance period, with the opportunity to create new cloud enabled businesses.

SAPPHIRE NOW: Leverage this industry analyst insight into trends of Cloud Computing Adoption, to determine which of the many Cloud Sessions would make the most sense for you and your company.

Taylor Stitch was born in a San Francisco apartment in 2008, when three friends decided to update the venerable bespoke shirt trade. The idea was to provide the quality of individual measurements and hand sewing while taking advantage of the speed and reach of the Internet. Once a customer has been hand-measured, he can order shirts of different styles online, and the retailer also offers an increasing variety of clothing in standard sizes.

Taylor Stitch grew steadily through word of mouth and pop-up stores. When it opened a San Francisco retail location in 2011, the founders knew they needed to get serious about their business systems.

“We needed something that would let us manage inventory on the fly,” says co-founder Michael Maher. A sold-out item at a pop-up in Boston would create cranky customers if it was still listed on the ecommerce site, for example.

The company went with three cloud-based applications: Shopify, a provider of online storefronts; Xero for accounting; and Vend for point of sale. The first decision point was price. “I couldn’t afford to custom build a $200,000 solution,” Maher says. With sales expected to reach $1.5 million this year, Taylor Stitch spends around $400 per month on its business systems.

As Lindsey Nelson recently pointed out, retailers reduce IT spending with cloud services because they don’t pay for hardware, servers and storage, and they typically pay only for the storage they need. Neither do they need IT staff or services.

Time is money, and speed is another advantage of cloud services, according to Phil Simon, business and technology consultant and author of The New Small: How a New Breed of Small Businesses is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies. “Retainers can be up and running with new applications faster and scale as need,” he says. Adding a new user to an application or turning on additional features can usually be done from a self-service dashboard. SMBs can turn off unneeded services or reduce usage — and costs — just as easily.

Flexibility is an additional benefit to cloud services. Says Maher, “It’s always at my fingertips. I don’t have to be tied to my store or logged into something offline. If I have my laptop and wireless, I can see my inventory from anywhere.”

Simon thinks there’s little risk that startup vendors will outright fail and go away, taking your business data with them. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t back up your data regularly. And while it’s usually remarkably easy to migrate a business process to a cloud-based service, you should be aware that they don’t always work well together, he says.

One final caveat from Simon: Shell out a few bucks for your cloud services. Many of them offer free and premium versions; it’s worth it to sign up for premium. He says, “You get what you pay for. If you pay nothing for a service, you’re not a customer, you’re a user.”

Photo: iStockphoto

The cloud has long been more than just a “hot topic” for IT decision-makers. Much has been said about its benefits and its pitfalls. Indeed, many enterprises are already dabbling in the cloud, shifting smaller “fringe” systems into it so that they can observe it in action. When it comes to ERP, however, huge question marks often remain about the viability of adopting the cloud. The risks involved in making the wrong decision are simply too great. After all, a company’s ERP system is its backbone: It contains critical functions and processes mission-critical data.  Often, it contains a wealth of in-house expertise. In short, you don’t mess with it unless you really have to.

The target is for three quarters of HR customers to be using cloud solutions by 2015, with a strong focus on “cloud shy” Europe, says Angela Mazza, Global Vice President for Human Resources at SAP.

Maxwell’s Law for SaaS

When it comes down to it, what is software as a service? I believe there is merely one law that should dictate SaaS, compared to many freedoms that it offers and that companies should take advantage of: Software as a service must packaged and sold as a service with service-level agreements (SLAs). 

In essence, a SAAS vendor is selling service levels in addition to the current and future functionality of the product. This is in contrast to selling a file of software.

The issue is quite simple if you think about snow removal (being from California and currently living in Boston, this is something that I unfortunately need to worry about). I could buy a snow removal product like a snow blower that comes with certain warranties and service associated with the product (spare parts, places to get the product fixed, etc.), or I could contract with a service provider to take care of it.

If I contract with the service, all I care about is when they come to remove the snow and how clean my driveway and walks are when they are done. I also care about the price. I don’t care about the products they use, how much labor they are using, or anything else.  Just the price and the SLA. It is exactly the same with SAAS!

The Many Freedoms SaaS Offers

I also believe there are many freedoms associated with SAAS:

• You can put your SAAS stack wherever you determine is best for your customer. This includes running the software in your own data center(s), putting it on one or more private, virtual private, or public clouds, running it on bare metal, any operating system, or any cloud infrastructure.

• You can architect your product however you determine is best for your customer. This could include single-tenant, multi-tenant, or any other architectural approach that will serve your customer well.

• You can include installed software, an appliance, or anything else that is valuable to your customers as part of your offering.

• Your software can be consumed by users any way that is best for them. This includes using thin clients, thick clients, or any other client, and your software can be consumed by other software via an API or any other interface that works well for your customer.
• You can build any whole product by surrounding your core product with any level of “people” services that will be best for your customers. This includes strategic services, customization services, installation and configuration services, training, customer service, or any other service that address your customers’ needs.

• You can price and bill for your software however you want, so long as it works for you and your customers.  This includes subscription pricing, one-time pricing, or any other pricing.  This includes one-time billing, annual billing, quarterly billing, monthly billing, or any other billing.

• You can sell your product and services any way that you want. This includes direct from your website, use of inside sales, use of field sales, and/or selling through indirect sales partners, or bundling your product with other products that are sold through another vendor.

• You can set any growth strategy for your company that you believe will make you successful. This could include building a capital-efficient company and growing/managing based on CAC ratios and magic numbers, an all out “own the market at any cost” winner-take-all strategy, or anything in between.

• You can do anything else that you want to do that will add value to your customers and/or help you build a great business.

Yes, I would like to see you minimize complexity, minimize labor, and have a great economic model, but most importantly, I would like to see you have a great competitive advantage and build a great company. And, of course, you need the freedom to figure out what that means for your specific situation!

The reason I wanted to approach this topic is that after working with SaaS companies for almost 10 years, there is still a lot of FUD in the markets about SaaS.  Many people restrict their freedoms and that can really have an impact on your ability to build a unique and valuable whole product for your customers and build a great company.

Note: I write this post using the term SaaS because it is a popular term. I actually believe the the right term is XaaS (“Zass”) standing for “Anything-as-a-Service,” so that it includes anything that the vendor wants to string together and offer as a service with SLAs (not just software).

What do your think? Are you blindly following the unnatural “laws” of others or are you freely deciding to build a competitive advantage with a great company growth strategy?

We check our Gmail or Yahoo! email – that’s the cloud. We listen to music on iTunes – that’s the cloud.

We may even drive [in the age of technology] in the cloud – or could be soon enough.

A Little History

Beginning in 1996, the onboard diagnostics (OBD-II) port became mandatory for U.S. cars. The OBD is an automotive term referring to the vehicle’s self-diagnostic and reporting capabilities, which provide technicians with information about the health of a vehicle.

Back in the day, these diagnostic tools would let the owner know that there was a malfunction, simply by triggering a light that would appear on the dashboard and let the owner know that there was “something wrong” with “something.”

These indicators showed an issue and acted as a proactive alert to help drivers and technicians be more accurate in their diagnosis of a problem and deploy a repair before the car was too damaged.

Fast-Foward to Today

Today, the intersection between automobiles and consumer electronics is expanding and consumers are purchasing new vehicles while heavily considering the tech functions, and not putting as much emphasis on the power of the engine or other basic functions. A new car without hands-free technology? Let me see the upgraded version.

As these two concepts converge and become more intertwined, driving will change and manufacturers will have to consider the technological aspects of their vehicles to stay competitive. As many cars have OBD-IIs that provide very specific diagnostic information to the driver, using the cloud and linking an automobile to the web is a tested idea that can be helpful for any driver.

Car to Cloud Benefits Can Include:

• Becoming more knowledgeable about auto diagnostics and data – This year at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, the Delphi was introduced (and will soon be available). This small device can be plugged into a car (with a 1996 or later version of the OBD-II) and using a wireless network and the cloud, the information from the car’s OBD-II can be transmitted and displayed in an online dashboard allowing for a deeper analysis of the totality of the vehicle. This provides information about any issues with the car, where the car has traveled, and the user can set-up alerts to be notified when certain benchmarks are hit and the car needs to be serviced.

• A more customized driving experience - A new product, AgeroView cloud software, can allow automotive infotainment system displays to be accessed and modified remotely, allowing car owners to customize dashboards based on their needs. Car dealers can wirelessly download the diagnostic data from the car and address any issues when the car is serviced, and manufacturers can update and upgrade infotainment systems without getting into the hardware.

But with anything, combining cloud and cars also raises many considerations such as security and hacking (in the UK, BMW OBD’s were hacked and reprogrammed, and thieves were able to steal cars using a generic key)…but we can get into that another time.

Other features (beyond car and cloud) already implemented in the automotive industry can be separated into two categories:

• The Smart car – a smart car features software that is responsible for delivering functionality that, in the the past, were only made possible by analog devices

• Connectivity – providing high-speed, reliable, and secure communications between the car and services that providers offer

Also, new life-like robots can also drive your car while you nap in the backseat. Okay, not really, but maybe one day…

The response of Boston-area hospitals and healthcare professionals has also been an inspiration. Well-honed emergency plans were activated as hospitals rose to the challenge of providing trauma care for the sudden influx of severely injured victims.

Medical professionals, some of whom had themselves been runners in the marathon, left the race to take their place on teams that were well-drilled in emergency procedures. Thanks to their swift response many lives were saved, but there is no denying that those who suffered the most severe injuries have a long road of recovery ahead.

How Healthcare in the Cloud Supports The Road to Recovery

Given the life-altering nature of the injuries, many of the bombing victims are likely to need ongoing care for a considerable period of time.  Coordination of care as they move through the healthcare system is vital to their recovery, particularly as some victims will need to be transferred from trauma units to facilities that specialize in meeting their specific healthcare needs.

While it may not have the glamour of cutting edge technology like pills equipped with cameras, prosthetic limbs that can feel, or exoskeletons that allow wheelchair users to walk, cloud computing plays a important “supporting role” in a hospital’s ability to treat the injured.  Although hospital patients are unlikely to be aware of the cloud, it enables the medical professionals caring for them to share information about their condition efficiently and securely.

By bringing together data that used to exist in silos, cloud technology helps improve communication and reduces the potential for medical errors when many specialists are involved in the care of a severely injured patient. The cloud offers digital collaboration capabilities for medical professionals who consult on a patient’s care, as well as shared access to diagnostic imagery and medical test results.

The consolidation of all medical tests, lab reports and prescribed medications in a single electronic dashboard can also significantly improve the way clinicians make decisions about patient treatment. And a healthcare cloud that extends beyond the walls of a single facility to include a network of hospitals, labs, and rehabilitation centers allows coordination of care for those patients who need extended healthcare services.

So while healthcare in the cloud may not make headlines in the media, it remains quietly in the background supporting the victims of the Boston bombing who are now on their own marathon of recovery from last week’s attack.

Our prayers are with all of the victims and their families as they journey on the road to recovery. If you wish to offer support for those most seriously impacted by the events of April 15th, please consider a donation to BostonOneFund.org, organized with the support of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino. 

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SaaS Solutions Coming to an Enterprise Cloud Near You

I have recently noticed a few cloud application companies that are starting to port their solutions to multiple clouds — with Amazon, Rackspace (and other OpenStack providers), Azure, IBM, HP, and Profit Bricks being some of the targets.

The idea is for their application stacks to be closer to the other applications and data that their customers already have on the clouds (note that this is the opposite of the approach taken by companies that are helping loads and data be transferred from one cloud to another. In this case the entire software stack is set up in multiple clouds more “permanently”).

I have also noticed that these companies are starting to pitch enterprise customers that have built their own private clouds (mostly on VMWare from what I can tell) on the idea of moving the vendor’s stack onto the enterprise private cloud with the software vendor tunneling in to perform maintenance on the stack. The pricing is still subscription pricing and the software vendor maintenance.

It is not at all widespread at this point, but I am noticing it more and more as I talk to expansion-stage companies. I would characterize it as software-as-a-service that is installed on an enterprise cloud.

Is this Installed-Software-as-a-Service the next evolution in enterprise software packaging?

I have asked a few enterprise data center heads this question and they seem to be open to the idea.

What are your thoughts?

But what if you were not only a home owner, but also the owner of a small local bank. What would happen to all your transactional data if that freak storm came through your town?

What Is Cloud Disaster Recovery?

Cloud computing is great for a lot of things, collaboration, saving your company money, and improving app development; however, it’s perfect for one thing – a data disaster recovery.

According to Wikipedia, cloud backup is “a service that provides users with a system for the backup, storage, and recovery of computer files…typically built around a client software program that runs on a schedule…once a day…it typically collects, compresses, encrypts and transfers the data to the remote backup service provider’s servers or off-site hardware.”

Cloud computing is the perfect technology to handle disaster recovery because it is a virtual server. Let’s take a basic “disaster”: you realized there’s a massive patch needed and it must be done to please your CIO overnight. Typically this process would be burdensome, you’d have to move all the data and apps over, execute the patch, then load everything back in.

With a cloud computing disaster recovery solution, you’d be hardware independent, your data and patches can be moved and executed without the reload at the end. It would only take minutes to do this with a virtual host and since you only pay for what you use with public and hybrid clouds, it makes it cost efficient. Why? Because for you would only pay for the storage you used that one time and wouldn’t have to incur the cost for the remaining year of unwasted space.

Cloud Disaster Recovery, Who Does What

Before you go forward with purchasing a cloud disaster recovery solution, do your homework. You’re going to need a blueprint of not only what you would like to have, but also who does those things the best.

For example, you may want something like a managed service provider. These MSPs manage both your production and disaster recovery. The benefit, it’s nice to only deal with one company. The con, they might not be able to provide you with the best quality your data and business deserve on both sides of the spectrum.

Or you could prefer to back up to and restore from the cloud. This means your applications and data will always have their home on-premise. The data is only backed up to the cloud and in case of an emergency would be there for when you needed to reload into your systems.

A third option is to back up to and restore in the cloud. This means everything you do, your applications, data and etc. only live in the cloud.

No matter which you choose, I highly suggest you choose one style of cloud disaster recovery. By doing so, you are eliminating risk, enabling agility, and saving not only paper – but also maybe your business from a data disaster.

What is Platform as a Service?

According to TechTarget.com, it is “a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the internet…(it) allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones.”

The last part is what has most likely attributed to PaaS’s success. Because the service is delivered over the internet, this freedom from hardware worry allows developers to focus on developing and launching an app. No concerns over storage and back up, they can quickly breeze through the app development.

PaaS is commonly confused with two things, one is it’s distant cousin middleware and the other one its family member, Infrastructure as a Service. Here’s the difference:

• With middleware, PaaS is a “superset”, giving developers the tools to develop to a particular platform without worrying about the configuring the servers to successfully deploy, manage, and monitor it. Whereas middleware still requires IT teams to handle all this maintenance

• IaaS delivers the service over the internet and the provider manages the creation of a virtual machine. The provider of IaaS handles all the hardware necessary for doing so. PaaS gives you access to create within and for a certain platform. and all the hardware isn’t even considered by the end user.

Why, or why not, Platform as a Service?

I touched briefly on it before but one of the biggest benefits of Platform as a Service is the speed and ease you can create, update, deploy and fix apps with the service. The groups who will see the biggest advantages in a system like this are your developers and impatient people.

It’s a more hands off approach and even cheaper because less time is spent updating the network as this is done for you. It’s cheaper because you spend less time evaluating how and what the app will do and instead quickly create and then test it. Giving you an advantage to have a custom created app without the cost.

So why not? According again to TechTarget.com,  there are risks of being locked in due to building apps on certain interfaces or in specific development languages.

Who is using Platform as a Service?

I sound like a broken record, but it’s really for application developers. But downstream, your business users are benefitting greatly from this quick transition from “keeping the lights on” to creating apps that bring value.

Are you using PaaS? Do you see a benefit or a disadvantage that I missed? Let me know by commenting on this post or telling me on Twitter @LindseyNNelson

As I travel the world, I see great excitement regarding the Cloud. It seems that virtually every organization, large or small, recognizes the need for a platform-as-a-service strategy. And many already have a well-established presence in the Cloud.

But there’s something larger at work here. Cloud is not merely the key to a faster, easier, cheaper IT infrastructure for today. It is also a gateway to many of the most exciting technologies of tomorrow.

From Mobile to Quantum

Cloud platforms offer the fastest way to adopt new technologies and new applications – such as mobile analytics and advanced collaboration platforms. The path to implementation can be measured in weeks, days, or even seconds.

For example, Nebraska Book Company recently used a Cloud platform to implement a highly collaborative sales application that helps the company compete with far larger competitors like Amazon and eBay.

Other innovative uses of the Cloud include:

• An ideal testing environment: For developers, Cloud is becoming a preferred way to save time and resources when testing mobile devices and mobile apps.

• The ultimate in connectedness: Cloud is an ideal platform for “ubiquitous intelligence,” the future state in which everyone and every device is connected. Examples include the Internet of Things, which is revolutionizing machine-to-machine communication.

• The path to new frontiers: Scientists have recently made great strides in “quantum” computing. Harnessing “superposition” and other principles of quantum physics, an emerging breed of atomic-level computers promises to tackle problems that cannot be solved by conventional linear processors.

As these and other technologies develop, many of them will simply work better through the Cloud. In fact, in their earliest stages they may be accessible and affordable only through a shared services model. Therefore, those organizations who are experienced in the Cloud could be among the first to adopt the latest advances.

In the meantime, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a model that makes sense for virtually any organization that wants to implement innovative applications – while reducing operating costs.

CIO to CIO Advice on Cloud

As a CIO, here are three key characteristics I would look for in a Cloud platform provider:

• Security: Does the provider offer the latest in security, such as deterrent controls, corrective controls, and business continuity?

• Stability: Is the provider an established, well-run company that will be there for the long run?

• Flexibility: Does the provider offer a wide range of plans that fit your business requirements?

A New Report Series

I’m excited to be following a new series of reports from Oxford Economics, sponsored by SAP, that offers important insights into how organizations around the world are harnessing the cloud to improve business outcomes. I think you’ll find it interesting too. Click here to download a copy of the first report, Unlocking the Cloud.

This post originally appeared on Cloud Platform Trends and is republished here with permission of the author.

Vendors who want to develop cloud-based applications need to make decisions around technical infrastructure and adjust to a financial model that’s based on recurring income rather than one-time sales and on-going maintenance contracts. However, they also need to consider how the model affects all other areas of the business.

For example, because the business model is so dependent on renewals and up-sells, customer loyalty becomes more important than ever. That means that cloud vendors need to behave less like product companies and more like service companies, whose success depends on getting their customers to keep coming back for more.

However, as David Linthicum bemoans in his recent article “Cloud computing’s Achilles’ heel: Poor customer service,”  that’s exactly where many cloud vendors fall short. Here are some strategies cloud vendors may want to consider when it comes to customer satisfaction and loyalty:

• Stay on top of complaints: Be sure to constantly track social buzz, periodically survey your customers, or contact customers directly. Bad news can spread like wildfire through social media, so you can’t afford to be caught off guard. But remember, complaints aren’t just bad news. Studies show customers whose complaints were resolved tend to become more loyal – and more likely to recommend you – than those who never complained at all.

• Take advantage of what you know about usage patterns: Customers who use more features become more “attached” to your solution than those who don’t. Since cloud vendors are in the unique position to know how customers are using their solutions, take advantage of that knowledge to target customers who are not making the best use of product with interventions to increase usage.

• Tie compensation of customer-facing employees to customer success: Track objective metrics such as login rates, use of features, and attrition, as well subjective feedback from your customer service team and your outreach efforts. Be sure to give your employees the resources to encourage customer loyalty.

• Encourage customer communities: Set up self-service sites where people can get answers to common questions, download popular resources, and – most importantly – connect with each other. This approach will save you money and encourage customer engagement and loyalty.

Successful cloud vendors share a maniacal dedication to customer service. And for more than for most software vendors, their survival depends on it.

Every day those CIOs not investing in developing the skills of their workforce are risking being outsourced completely to third party services providers.

This is called Shadow IT and it’s when departments outside of IT use budget to implement a third party software product without IT’s approval or knowledge. So as a CIO, how can you combat this?

How To Prepare Your IT Team For Cloud Computing

First, work with your infrastructure and operations teams. Get them comfortable with the cloud and using it. Do an internal audit and see which departments are using what, then bring your I&O team up to speed on how they can support.

Having employees who are educated and trained on the latest and greatest can prevent your team from hitting the curb. Because if your IT team can’t figure it out, your fast-paced sales teams will find someone who can.

That’s why second, you need to position yourself and your team as an evolving one. You’re here to learn, collaborate, and improve the user interfaces of your outdated systems by using the cloud’s quick deployment advantages.

This is where the third reason comes in. It’s not going to be an easy journey, but start working right away on developing new processes that are easy to manage. It isn’t just the technology that’s changing, so is the workforce. Millennials like me don’t want to be bothered with 12 steps if we have a friend at a start-up that can do it in 5.

Now, as CIO you have the ability, if executed strategically, to become one of the most sought-out internal consultants, as well as gain some serious C-suite street cred. You must ensure you are walking the talk, especially when it comes to collaboration. Make sure you’re ready to share the IT decision making.

According to a Forbes article by Keith Engelbert, “As companies increasingly store more data in the cloud, more C-level executives and senior-level decision makers will also have access to corporate data in the cloud, which in turn will increase their influence with IT decisions that pertain to the cloud.”

So in summary,

• Share
• Play together nicely
• Educate yourself and your team
• Continue to develop your skills

Sounds more like lessons in life than in cloud computing, but hey – some things are universal.

Did I forget anything? Please let me know by commenting on this post or let’s continue the conversation on Twitter @LindseyNNelson

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Cloud computing can be delivered 1 of 3 ways: software, infastructure, and platform as a service. Last time we discussed the in’s and outs of who, what, and why’s of software as a service (SaaS), now we’re going to cover infrastructure as a service.

What is Infrastructure as a Service?

Defined by SearchCloudComputing, infrastructure as a service is a “model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components.”

So what does that actually mean? Think of it this way.  An IaaS provider is like your utilities company. All you have at home are the plugs in the wall and a breaker box, but you don’t actually make your own electricity. The utilities company, or the infrastructure as a Sservice providers, house and maintain the hardware required to give you power. And just like the utilities company, at the end of a determined time period you, the user, owe them money for what you’ve used.

Who is using Infrastructure as a Service?

A lot of people. Why do I say that? Because according to Gartner, infrastructure as a service will see a CAGR of 41.3% from now till 2016, making it as the fastest growing X-as-a-Service.

But who is actually providing it?  Think of companies like Amazon Web Services, AT&T, and BlueLock. These providers seek to help you cut costs, relieve stress on your storage, and offer the power of computing capacity all for a fee.

Why, or why not, Infrastructure as a Service?

There are a few reasons why infrastructure as a service may be the best path for you. The first, is that it’s flexible.  Your IT can shift from management of the data center to thinking strategically and using the new technology.

If you want only a few elements of a data center, but not everything, IaaS gives you the opportunity to select a variety of “services”. For example, you can have your server as a service, or hardware. And you can access your infrastructure from anywhere.

The second is that it saves. You save cash because you have no maintenance costs on the hardware, and you pay only for what you use. So in light activity months you get a much lower bill. This enables you to put that cash somewhere else worth developing.

It also saves energy. These IaaS providers typically have the ability to run optimized data centers. And last, but not least, it saves you space. Freeing up hardware for more mission-critical information and giving you the opportunity to store low priority data in the cloud.

Why not go for IaaS? Maybe you have too much critical data and you need to meet privacy laws. Or perhaps the variable payments do not work well for your business.

No matter what, ask yourself a few questions before you jump over:

• Will IaaS actually suit my business needs or solve a business problem?
• Do I have a strong service level agreement?
• Is this vendor right for what I’m looking for?
• How will I pay? And how often?

Let me know if I forgot anything by either commenting on this article or bringing the conversation to Twitter @LindseyNNelson

photo via planetplc.com

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Everyone’s been talking about the cloud for the last few years like it’s something new and different. For those of us with a long(er) memory, it’s a new buzzword for an old concept.

Back in the mid ‘90s, whenever we needed to draw a mobile network, we drew a cloud. I never really questioned why we drew a cloud, and don’t recall even calling the mobile network a cloud—even though it was/is one.

Going back further you can trace the concept of so-called cloud computing back to the very early days of computing in the 1950s. In those days, computers came in one-size: the mainframe. And the mainframe model is that of a client-server. You would access the information you needed through a dumb terminal (the client), which connected to the mainframe (the server).

The next phase was minicomputers, which was far from ‘mini’ by today’s standards, but at least they didn’t fill the entire room like the previous generation mainframe. Again the model was client-server, with all your data stored remotely and accessed through a (relatively) ‘dumb’ terminal.

Then came the 1980s, and we entered the age of personal computers. The first system that would be recognizable as a full working PC would the Xerox Alto—and then Star. They both had a keyboard and a mouse. The Star also had a window-based GUI, and built-in Ethernet connectivity. It was a networked computer from the start. So the ‘first’ modern personal computers were still using the network model of the previous generations. But for various reasons, the early modern PCs/OSs (Apple Lisa, Windows 1.0, GEM and AmigaOS) had little or no networking capabilities. Once they entered the home, networking was all but lost. And so the need to store all information locally, outside the cloud, made computers truly ‘personal’ for the first time.

Since the late ‘90s, we’ve been working our way back to the old client-server model. From the early start of the likes of CompuServe to the WiFi-soaked homes and coffee shops of the 2010s, we’ve increasingly gone back to the cloud. It started with email. Over time, we’ve been accessing more and more services through our new ‘dumb terminal’: the web browser.

Back in the ‘90s another term appeared: ‘thin client’. Like most, I took this to mean thin as in a small amount of software/code—so basically another client/terminal.

But today, thin clients are actually physically thin. They are mobile phones and tablets running apps, or any mobile device accessing cloud data through a browser/web front-end. In your hand, you hold more computing power than your laptop.

And where is nearly all your data? In the cloud.

The cloud is really a return to that same framework we had up until the ‘90s. Looking at it this way, PCs and their locally stored data may be just a blip in the evolution of how we use computers.

Will we miss them? For a lot of people – no. Non-technical people have struggled to manage all their own software, local data, backup, etc. For the casual user, it was much simpler before when the experts handled all that. Now we’re back to the same idea, where all the critical information is kept safe in a remote location. This model is also better for corporations because they can be wholly in charge of their data.

Now that wireless networks and the Internet have brought us back round, it seems like using local data will again become the exception—instead of the rule.

Like all IT and most major companies, where there’s a product, there’s an acronym. And cloud has quite a few. This post gives a quick and dirty overview of the what, why, and who of software as a service.

What is Software as a Service?

Before I start, let me say one thing: there’s no such thing as an actual cloud your documents float in and when you need them you make it rain (that’d be pretty cool though, a bunch of corporate executives doing the rain dance to get last quarters financial report?)

So what is it? Webopedia defines it as the model where applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network. This network is typically the internet,

Who is using Software as a Service?

So far, SaaS has mostly been deployed by small to midsized businesses, but this doesn’t eliminate large businesses from utilizing the service.

Why, or why not, Software as a Service?

A good reason for SaaS, especially for small businesses, is because you can implement enterprise-class functionalities and applications all for a pay as you go price. These applications, although not really customizable, address your basic business problems and processes all without the cost of a data center.

Now by customizable I mean to fit your specific business needs. SaaS gives users the opportunity to “drag and drop” and other front end functionality to fit the UI to their liking.

There are benefits to buying it “out of the box”. Advantages like faster implementation, easier access to the newest technology, fewer bugs (SaaS is comprised of one code base so it’s less complex which leads to less system errors).

However, sometimes it’s a benefit to have a complex system. SaaS isn’t built to support your entire business, it’s really only built to serve one function. Some great examples are CRM tools and collaboration applications.

If you’re looking for more in-depth information, CIO.com published an excellent 8 page “article”, The Truth About Software as a Service. It is jam packed with everything you would need to know about SaaS

Read more from Business Innovation >>

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In my recent career I have been selling pricing solutions to sales teams in order to keep prices as high as possible.

Prior to that, I was selling purchasing systems to procurement teams in order to keep prices low.

In the mid-2000s I sold cloud-based sourcing systems. The fundamental strategy back then was  essentially to construct a format whereby the suppliers could be “lined up, then beaten up”. The buyer constructed a highly constrained evaluation matrix, and forced all suppliers to compete in the same way, and for the coup de grace, made them participate in a Reverse Auction. It was a cloud-based solution, sure, but could not really be called collaborative.

Then I went to a couple of Pricing Software vendors, who sell price optimisation to sellers. The value proposition here was reversed, the idea was extreme segmentation. Huge gains can be made by discovering and exploiting small differences in customer response to price. Segments can be constructed by customer size, end-use, geography, season so that the same bottle of oxygen can command a price five times higher when it is shipped to a hospital compared with going to a welding shop. These solutions were also cloud-based.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now

.. and this is what I have learnt: a cloud is not the same thing as a Network at all. I don’t think I am qualified to unpick all of the stanzas of the great Joni Mitchell’s song, but here’s one of them:

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It’s cloud illusions I recall

I really don’t know clouds at all

Don’t make my mistake of trying to “know clouds” by looking at a series of traditional business processes which have merely migrated from your IT system to someone else’s. These cloud solutions are not really disruptive business processes at all. The cloudy nature relates to how the software is licenced, installed and upgraded. Interesting to the IT team, but not fundamentally changing the way commerce is transacted.

There’s much more to a Business Network than just moving an existing Purchasing or Pricing solution from your computer to ours. Here’s a short list of the types of applications that are possible on a Network

• A Purchasing System which allows suppliers to collaborate on the RFP to reflect their different capabilities and solutions to a business problem, rather than jamming them into an evaluation matrix, and actively seeks new suppliers that you may not have heard of

• A CRM system that actually goes out and locates leads, based on active sales opportunities discovered on the network, rather than the administering the tired-old leads you already have

• A Pricing system that can get econometric data from the network as a basis for better pricing decisions

Business networks are different. They live in the cloud, but they are collaborative rather than exploitative. Both sides of the transaction gain from the use of the network. The Cloud/Network is too important a change to be viewed as merely a change in software licensing.

If your justification for a Cloud Solution is a convenient saving for the IT department then maybe you “don’t know clouds at all”.

Most of their retail stores are located in Europe, however the states host a few.  Zara is one of the world’s largest fashion retailers and belongs to one of the largest distribution groups, Inditex.

The company has always shown strong growth and is incredibly sustainable through application of their Business Model Innovation. They look at and analyze current fashion trends, create a collection, then only ship a few of each item to their stores. This leaves little left on the shelves, so low risk if the trend doesn’t turn out the way they hoped.

But to make sure, the store managers and employees are trained to talk to the customer. Find out what they like and don’t like about the design. They then take this data and send it to headquarters. The designers go back to the drawing board and repeat the process. The only difference between Zara and a competitor is Zara has their new product in the stores in 3 weeks, compared to 9 months for a store like the Gap.

Their supply chain is a force to be reckoned with and may even be comparable to that of FedEx or UPS how smoothly they create, produce and deliver. Cloud computing helps the store managers and the market specialists talk in real time by exchanging notes via customized handheld computers.

This data is then transferred, using cloud computing, to the designers. The designers then update the product and send the final draft to the different manufacturers. And voila! Within weeks a new product is on the shelves. It may look like the old one, but it’s improved.

All of this is enabled and executed easily because of their IT Infrastructure. They make decisions based on the data they have all in real time. Daily sales numbers, delivered to systems using cloud computing, show the designers what and what isn’t selling. Enabling them to become agile and encourage frequent visits from their customer base.

Now if only they could focus on enabling online shopping, I’d be happy…

What are some other great examples of retailers using cloud computing? I’m interested to hear! Let me know by commenting on this article or bring the conversation to Twitter @LindseyNNelson

…But, that doesn’t mean it’s time to relax and rest on your laurels, because there is always something to consider when using cloud technology and ensuring that you are “getting it right,” protecting your data/information, and mitigating risks as much as possible.

A main consideration, and it could be your next step to address it, is the creation and implementation of a multi-cloud strategy, which is powerful for risk mitigation and can be the foundation of a crisis plan. A multi-cloud strategy refers to the process of running cloud-based deployments on multiple cloud providers. Although this may sound redundant, it’s the redundancy and added layer of security that could be the difference between a crisis, and a well-c0ntroled, quickly addressed situation.

Service Provider Downtime

A main concern is the failure of a service provider to operate. If there is a deployment of multiple cloud strategies, when one cloud provider experiences difficulties, the deployments can remain operating by transferring to the backup option. This contingency plan leaves little room for downtime and can save time and money.

Reduced Vulnerability

Another concern is vulnerability. If you are using a multi-cloud strategy and there is a vulnerability or a breach in security in a provider, you can simply shut down the servers on the vulnerable or affected provider with little or no impact to your operations. This can happen quickly, flawlessly, and without much room for error.

Creating and using a multi-cloud strategy could be an integral proactive preventative solution to a problem that may be about to happen…because, as with anything, there is always the potential for failure or malfunction and cloud-based services are not immune. The workaround is to anticipate potential issues, plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

As I’m sure if you’re reading this article, you’re already with me. It’s not you I have to convince, but it’s you who has to convince your CEO. But I’m guessing if you aren’t there already, he’s a huge skeptic. So how do you persuade him/her otherwise?

Here are 5 steps to convince your CEO 0n cloud computing:

1. Keep it short and simple, this may seem like common sense, however your CEO gets a lot of information and great ideas thrown at them day in and day out. Your pitch should be short. This means you’ll have to do the homework ahead of time. Here are a few articles to help you brush up on your cloud computing vocab and determine which type of cloud will best suit your business requirements.
   1. Vocab
   2. Common myths
   3. Benefits of: Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud
2. Include both the benefits and risks. Your CEO isn’t a dummy, they know there is no such things as a one size fits all fix. So make sure you include not only the benefits, but also the risks your business may encounter if they switch to cloud computing.
3. You can transform your IT to a strategic team. If you decide to go with a public or hybrid cloud, you’ll be able to outsource a lot of the maintenance and day to day activities that typically fill up your IT team’s agendas. In turn, this will give them freedom to work on strategic initiatives.
4. Come with a timeline. Cloud computing comes with a major benefit – you can get up and running relatively quickly. Like as quickly as going to Amazon and logging in quickly. Bring your CEO a timeline and an easy project to get started with. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, starting with an easy project will safeguard the rest of your company’s transition.
5. Boast about mobility. Every CEO either travels, or rarely has the time to sit and digest the information at their desk. So really talk up the mobility that comes with a cloud computing transition. It’s the very reason why its gaining so much attention. By using cloud based apps, your employees have more mobility and freedom. They can be connected and collaborative at all times of the day, without any obstacles. So in CEO speak, “higher productivity, innovation, and collaboration” – even for his/her busy schedule.

All of these steps will not get you anywhere unless you do your homework. Take the time to educate yourself before you try and convince someone else. However, these actions and the Business Innovation Cloud section should definitely help you get started.

Any company that has more than five customers or clients should consider using a CRM tool and the best tools are those that exist in the cloud. Cloud-based software, especially for CRM, is “all the rage,” and for really great reasons.

Here are seven:

1. Access…from anywhere. Because of the nature of cloud-based systems, an associate can login from just about anywhere with Internet and be able to access their account and client/customer information. This can be helpful when making last minute sales calls, closing a sale from a remote location, and finding contact information on-the-go.

2. Great mobile apps. Another layer to being able to access information from anywhere, is the mobility aspect, which accompanies most CRM solutions. Most service providers have a robust enough mobile application that can be downloaded onto an Adroid or iOS device, and the most important information is readily available once the app is activated. This really compliments those who travel often, or run from meeting to meeting throughout the day and need information quickly.

3. Scalability. Because cloud-based systems are flexible with providing capacity, cloud-based CRMs can allow a company to scale up or down depending on their needs. That might mean that a company only needs a certain amount of contacts and storage, but as their company grows, they need to increase capacity without waiting for an entire new program to be written or a lengthy upgrade. Often times, with cloud-based CRMs, a company can notify the provider and instantly expand their capacity based on current needs. This can happen almost instantly!

4. Flexible integration. The way many companies use CRM systems is by keeping it updated and serving as a database of all client/customer information. Other applications or software that provide added services (email clients, etc.) are linked directly to the CRM to allow seamless information exchange between the technologies. With a cloud-based CRM system, these integrations are usually much easier to initiate and maintain.

5. Collaboration. Cloud-based CRM systems allow users to have their own logins and therefore, multiple accounts can be logged in at the same time and working on edits to contacts or other information. This also prevents information from being stored and isolated on individual devices, as it provides an easy-to-understand option for sharing.

6. Data backup. Since a company stores such a vast amount of confidential and powerful information within a CRM, a key component is to be sure the data is backed up in more than one place, and an external data warehouse can be secure, safe, and provide the bandwidth needed by a company with lots of data. Cloud-based CRMs pay close attention to their backup policies and usually have a recovery process if data was disturbed or breached.

7. Social CRM Option. Now, more CRM systems are upgrading to include a social CRM aspect. This allows interactions with clients/customers in the social space to be tracked through the system and provide a more holistic approach to customer service by integrating any social interactions (especially if a company uses social media for customer relations). Using a cloud-based system will give you instant access to the updates and expanded offerings without having to download a new program and/or upgrade all devices.

Check out this infographic from CRM Software blog that list some of the best CRM systems.

Does your company use a cloud-based CRM? What do you think makes it awesome?

Unfortunately, all this buying behind IT’s back can lead to disaster for a number of reasons. IT can’t fix a problem when one arises; your company’s data is everywhere instead of home base; and you could face serious compliance issues.

As a CIO, you must turn this obstacle into an opportunity and transform the way your IT department approaches not only the processes they have in place, but also to a more strategic role. One way to do it is to strengthen the relationship with the CFO; another is to stop asking how you should stop it, but instead reach out to organizations to see what they actually need.

Utilizing these insights from your business counterparts can make a big difference in not only the state of your business’s cloud computing, but also how your team is viewed. Becoming a partner is better than a sherrif. Taking back control and becoming a strategic organization is exactly what you need. But first, you’re going to need a plan.

Here are 4 steps to a cloud computing strategy

• Audit Your IT – ever seen Sex in the City 1? Carrie is moving in with her soon to be husband Big and giving up her apartment. One issues is she has so many clothes they won’t fit in the new (smaller) closet. So, she makes three buckets: keep it, trash it, store it. Even if you’ve never seen the movie you’re going to do what Carrie did. You’re going to: keep it, replace it, or migrate it. This will mean taking a look at what cloud computing applications you have (remember my suggestion of talking with your business counterparts?). Keep in mind the sustainability of your data center, how much room do you have? Or if you’re on a public cloud, what’s the budget?

• Sensibly Design Your Cloud – after the audit you’ll know which apps to keep in which department, so design the cloud around these insights. Determine if you need a public, private, or hybrid cloud then design around that. As you’re designing make sure you understand the complexity, you’ll need it for step 4.

• Implementation – would you go on a trip to a foreign place with no map, no expertise of the area and only know a few words of the native language? Probably not, but if so I bet you’d find a tour guide. So why would you implement a cloud by yourself when there are “tour guides”. Implementation service providers can do all the work efficiently and more importantly RIGHT.

• Oversee It – once everything is up and running, make sure you understand the environment so you can effectively manage. Supervising your cloud computing is one of the most important things because if you let it get out of control you may never see the data again.

Even though I am a huge proponent of cloud computing, by no means do I think every business should run every application on the cloud. However, I truly believe it will be an integral part of every business in the very near future so my suggestion for IT – get with the times and put that plan in place before you’re really too late.

The cloud market has evolved rapidly over the past few years. Platform, integration, and specialization remain crucial to expansion.

Analysts predict the following trends in 2013:

• As the cloud market matures, niche vendors continue to be consolidated;  it is expected that SaaS acquisitions would exceed $25 billion over the next 20 months, a 50% increase from the past 20 months

• As hybrid deployments and heterogeneous landscapes proliferate, integration will continue to dominate the cloud discussions. Analysts predict the iPaaS market will grow nearly 35% in 2013

• Industry-specific PaaS offerings will continue to emerge in 2013. We’ve already witnessed pockets of these, such as the NYSE trading community platform, Panoptix from Johnson Controls, and BaseSpace platform from Illumina. It is interesting to note that these offerings are built by industry-specific players rather than IT vendors. It is expected that the “generic” (horizontal) PaaS market will become commoditized

• Cloud is also making its way into IT organizations within the enterprises. CIOs’ adoption of a “cloud first” strategy will double to 70% by 2016 as CIOs define architecture standards and service management processes. Skill gaps will be a critical issue in enabling this transformation. As PaaS gains popularity, it will be embraced as the next generation platform by CIOs. IT organizations will  play a key role in providing cloud brokerage services in the future months

• Mid-market companies will also leverage more cloud services in 2013. Service providers are expected to play a major role in providing specific, targeted solutions to midmarket companies.  Private cloud engagements in particular  will gain traction among SMBs in the U.S. – more than 25% of midmarket firms will leverage this in 2013

• Cloud security will be another significant growth pillar. While North America will continue to have the largest revenue share, analysts predict emerging markets and Eastern Europe to have the fastest growth

Check out the SAP slideshare presentation to learn more about the 2013 trends.

This post originally appeared on SCN Business Trends and was republished with permission.

Now I know we all heard about Marissa Mayer’s recent ban on Yahoo employees working from home, but she had the data to support her choice. Please don’t take my comment as accordance with her decision, I firmly believe providing employees the opportunity to work at home is an essential policy companies should have.

However, if you’re concerned about eventually experiencing Yahoo’s low productivity levels, don’t fret too much. If you invest in cloud computing platform for your business and equip your employees with the right applications, you will never encounter the mess Mayer had to clean up.

So What Is Cloud Computing Collaboration?

Before I launch into the benefits, some of the ways you can use cloud computing for collaboration identified by BizAnytime.com are:

• Web & video conferencing
• Project, team and client workspaces that are shared and accessible
• Discussion forums
• File sharing and storage, especially large files
• Task management

Cloud Computing Offers 3 Collaboration Advantages

The first two advantages go hand in hand: collaboration Cloud computing is reinventing the collaboration wheel, allowing employees to not only work from home, but also from the beach, or the pool, anywhere. That’s the point. Your employees, using cloud computing, can access critical corporate data from their mobile, tablet, or laptop.

Say someone was working on a PowerPoint for a customer meeting, but went on vacation without their laptop (impressive I know) and forgot to send it to the presenter. That’s got disaster + fire drill + probably a lost deal written on the walls.

By equipping your employees with the right cloud computing tools, the PowerPoint would be stored in a centralized location, accessible by the presenter, or the creator on his mobile device from vacation if there were any needs for updates.

These updates can happen in real-time, no need to download, save, resend; the document can be edited, saved, closed out and accessible to the next person all within minutes.

The third cloud computing collaboration advantage is the speed of updating your applications. As your business evolves, so will your demands on your applications. Before it would take a few years and a lot of headaches to update what you had, but now it can be done quickly and easily.

No matter which cloud you use, public, private or a hybrid. All can fit your collaboration needs. However, if you’re a small to mid-size business with not that large of an IT budget I would stick with the public or a hybrid cloud. You can pay as you go, only for what you use, and not deal with the cost of infrastructure maintenance.

Did I forget anything? Let me know by commenting on this article or bringing the conversation to Twitter @LindseyNNelson.

photo via foliocloud.com

“Barnes & Noble is in trouble,” a headline in The Washington Post stated last week, “but bookstores aren’t doomed just yet.”

Nebraska Book Company uses cloud technology to successfully swim against the current of failing bookstores.

Strategies for saving the New York-based bookseller range from concentrating on its 674 profitable stores to jettisoning its Nook program and taking the retail operation private, The Post reported. Whatever Barnes & Noble does, it’s clear that the current business model is broken.

The same could be said for brick-and-mortar bookstores worldwide. Schemes to rescue the industry include transforming bookstores into cultural destinations, charging admission and selling museum-style memberships, according to The Economist last week.

At least one bookseller seems to have found a functioning model. Nebraska Book Company has been able to streamline its business by taking a page from SAP’s book, especially its cloud-based sales application.

Every Trick In The Book

“We picked up SAP Sales OnDemand with the key intent of being more collaborative,” Mike Kelly, senior VP for NBC, told SAP TV. “The first thing we wanted to do was give our [sales] reps a way to communicate with each other without using e-mail.”

Sales OnDemand is a social network-style collaborative solution with a familiar user interface. It helps people:

• Communicate efficiently
• Harness collective sales network knowledge
• Stay abreast of opportunities in real-time

All of NBC’s relevant sales data is available at the touch of a finger on an iPad.

NBC has a lot at stake, operating more than 200 stores and selling more than 6 million textbooks annually. The Lincoln, Neb.-based chain evaluated characteristics of a profitable bookstore and built that into Sales OnDemand, consolidating all of that data into one convenient location for its sales people.

“We’ve taken 50 percent of what reps spent their day doing, and we’ve eliminated it because they were looking at 10 different places, 10 different sources, having to talk to 10 different people,” Kelly said. “We’ve put that all onto one screen at the touch of their finger on an iPad.”

One For The Books

NBC has an annual sales meeting, at which the company gives away four sales awards. Only three sales representatives qualified for the award last year, but every sales representative qualified for the award this year.

NBC’s cloud-based solution provided the time and information that sales representatives needed to optimize their performance.

“The key to getting from three eligible to 100 percent eligible was giving them the time and the information that they needed to work with stores and be more profitable,” Kelly said. “And that’s what Sales OnDemand helped us do.”

The story of high technology saving the paper book industry might include predictable sales applications and real-time analytics, as well as the previously unthinkable, such as digital books and self-printing.

No matter how the story unfolds, it’s sure to be a page-turner.

This article originally appeared in SAP Business Trends.

image via CloudProviderUSA.com

Machine to Machine technology and the Internet of Things is the way the world is going. Already you see things like “smart cities” and “smart sensors” in utilities becoming a common practice, rather than a scene from a 1980s futuristic film.

Cloud computing is fundamental to the IoT because of the interconnectedness I mentioned earlier. How? Let’s start with an example.

A Typical Day In 2021

You wake up, get in the shower and reach for your soap and notice it’s getting empty. Now if you experienced that today, you’d have to add it to your to-do list and hope you didn’t forget before you ran out. However, in the very near future, with the Internet of Things and cloud computing, say goodbye to the task list, it’s all automatic now.

Your shower knows and streams your soap habits so it probably already predicted you’d be running low. A sensor recognizes “bottom of the bottle” squeezing noise and recognizes your heightened blood pressure and annoyance.

It checks local grocery stores inventories while simultaneously checking your calendar to see where you’ll be going today, if there’s a grocery store local to your appointments and what time would work best to go. Then automatically creates a task and a reminder that works for you. This task is then accessible on not only your mobile device, but also your laptop, iPad or your car’s (future) dashboard.

This isn’t made possible by a string of wires, it was made possible by sensors and applications that monitor, collect, and send the data. Then, coupled with cloud computing, this information can be sent to a number of devices and all updated with you even rinsing out your loofa.

However, this means there is a lot of information coming in at once. Information that needs to be handled quickly, but also information that can provide insights to manufacturers, suppliers, and everyone in the supply chain. So how can cloud computing help?

How Cloud Computing Helps the IoT

Think about it, each culture has a standard set of working hours. In America, it’s anywhere between 8 AM and 6 PM; so that means people in the same region, in the same area, are all getting ready for work at the same time. That would be a lot of data coming in from many showers at once.

No fear, the cloud is here! It can handle the volume and speed of which the data will be received. Cloud computing’s ability to ebb and flow with spikes in demand all while accessible from any device, anywhere, is another reason it is an essential piece to the puzzle.

The second issue is the data. Let’s talk about the soap example, this is individual transactional data. However, there’s a lot of insights to be learned. For example, manufacturers can see how often the average user goes through a bottle of specific soap, they can see if that user will buy that soap again, or go for another with a longer shelf life.

These insights could enable sellers to create custom offers specific for users similar to our shower friend, deliver them to his/her phone and all by this afternoon they could buy the next bottle of soap with a $2 discount. However, this would mean utilizing the information laying dormant, or not required to complete the individual transaction example above.

In order to extract insights from this information big data solutions are necessary. They’re also a good partner with cloud solutions because of the very same reasons stated earlier. Cloud computing is an adept technology handling the amount of data and working in real time.

Although the Internet of Things has yet to be realized, it’s well on its way to becoming the new standard and cloud computing will surely be essential to its growth.

How else can cloud computing advance, empower, or support the Internet of Things? Let me know by commenting on this article or bringing the conversation to Twitter @LindseyNNelson.

For years, educators and academics have focused research on figuring out the best ways to leverage the internet and accessibility to bring education to places that lack the infrastructure of an organized society, and to extend the opportunity of learning beyond a classroom setting.

In the United States, online learning has made a positive impact in increasing accessibility, and also the affordability of education on all levels. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than two of every three colleges and universities offer online credit courses with over 12 million students participating in distance learning (77 percent in online courses; 12 percent in hybrid courses; 10 percent in other forms of distance education). The courses receive scrutiny for not having that in-person experience, but receive accolades for ways they’ve creativity integrated interpersonal communication, and the success of some of the programs.

These online education communities provide flexibility with materials and lessons to the millions of students, learning at individual levels and speeds, and scalability for the institutions using this system – and they have cloud computing to thank for the technology. This type of cloud-based education technology is rapidly evolving and allowing education to venture beyond traditional teaching methods and into new ways of learning.

Recently, Newcastle University professor, Sugata Mitra, won a $1 million 2013 TED prize for his innovative thinking in research and education in technical literacy in underdeveloped areas. His TED Talk, Build a School in the Cloud, expresses his ideas and foundations for his thoughts. Mitra is working to develop an education system that can benefit, what he calls, Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs), that learn through personal and group exploration coupled with curiosity and without structured curation.

This type of education Mitra is looking to deploy in underdeveloped and remote areas would be a cloud-based system providing moderators, but relying heavily on the exploration of a group of students working together and navigating through computer programs. The moderators would use Skype technology to have conversations with the students and play more of a passive, listening role rather than a directive teaching role.

Although Mitra and many educators alike do not think that cloud-based education collaboration could really replace traditional education, they do agree that these methods can have an instant impact on society by providing levels of education to those that may not have access to traditional methods. These methods can serve as supplementation for groups and individuals and hopefully, bring what comes with education – opportunity.

Here are three reasons why cloud computing in retail is a win:

1. A Mobile Point of Sale Experience

Have you ever been to a J. Crew store? They’re overstaffed with sales people on the floor who are persistently helpful and go out of their way to ensure you have a pleasant customer experience. However, during a busy day, I’ve found they’re always understaffed at the register. Now most of their stores have the square footage to frictionless accommodate both line-goers and shoppers perusing around the accessories.

Imagine if those smiling sales clerks were equipped with a mobile device like an iPad and as soon as you confirm you like the style and size of that fabulous dress (last in your size!), you hand it over the door with your credit card. Then, while you dress they check you out right there, handing your bagged purchase over; thus avoiding the terrible drama of the line experience.

The mobile PoS information would be transmitted quickly to your database where your headquarters could immediately begin updating the inventory for the store. And you would be a happy customer on your way to boast about how easy your shopping trip was.

2. A Simpler IT Infrastructure

Running a retail business isn’t easy, but neither is running a retailer’s database. And according to an IBM White Paper, “Cloud Computing for Retail“, retailers are always looking to innovate and add layers of capabilities on, making for a complex IT infrastructure.

Although retailers have the lowest IT budgets of all the major industries, 70% of it is spent maintaining the current state, and that’s not including your annual operational costs like power and cooling.

By moving to the cloud, retailers can significantly reduce spending because they’ll no longer have to pay the money for server maintenance, IT labor, data center space and electricity costs. Freeing up that budget to may open a new store, hire a few employees, or just focus on the business at hand.

3. Manage Spikes in Demand

Retailers aren’t very resourceful with only 5 to 15% of their computing capacity utilized during a regular day. But they must have that extra space to help manage the holiday demands.

Public and hybrid clouds directly combat this issue, enabling retailers to manage the spike in activity without sacrificing customer experience or distracting them from what’s really the issue, trying to find a size small amongst a mess of sweaters during a 50% off sale. Trust me, I’ve been there and it’s bad.

Did I miss any ways cloud computing in retail will make changes? Let me know by commenting on this article or on Twitter @LindseyNNelson

Fifty years ago, business security meant having good locks on the doors, filing cabinets and employee briefcases. Once email came along, business security grew to include software that monitors email for viruses and making sure that everyone only uses their corporate accounts.

Then we all started bringing our mobiles to work. Business security evolved again to incorporate device management. IT can now lock down all the phones and tablets on the company network, mandate password protection and remote wipe them if they get lost or stolen—among other things.

But now there’s a new chink in the armour. Documents and data are bigger than ever. Put a half-dozen graphics in your PowerPoint deck, and the file is 10-20MB. Try to email that, or a video file, and you’ll likely choke your recipients’ email account.

So when we need to share big files, we find—ahem—workarounds.

Enter cloud-based file sharing systems: Box, Dropbox, SkyDrive, etc. Upload your multi-mega-bytes and send a link to your co-workers where they can download them. Easy. Trouble is, it’s also risky.

Many IT departments aren’t aware—or perhaps don’t want to know—how many confidential documents are out there on these services. There is a level of security, but it’s completely outside the control and audit of the company.

SAP (full disclosure: my employer) is now offering one way to solve the problem: SAP Mobile Documents. We announced it recently at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

SAP Mobile Documents is a service that lets companies set up their own file-sharing service. The IT department can roll it out company-wide and give employees a safe and official way to share whatever they need to share. You get the convenience of cloud-based service, but you get to keep corporate data behind a virtual locked front door. Mole: whacked.

I did a little research, and I found a couple common cloud computing concerns and a way to talk you out of your doubt.

Top Cloud Computing Concerns and How to Deal

Photo via nail-biting.net

Sensitive Data and Security

Much to your dismay, there’s a security benefit to putting your information in the cloud. The traditional security hole fixes take weeks, with costly downtime and more often than not issues just start to pile up. Especially if you’re a global company, you’ve probably got more than one to fix. However, with the cloud you it’s one band-aid for everybody.

We’ve all heard about the high profile break-ins, but you weren’t the only one. More and more service providers are taking this very seriously and putting in procedures to prevent this from happening to you. Make sure when you finally find a provider you like, they talk to you about not only the virtual security they have, but also the physical security in their data centers. Also ensure they back up every transaction almost instantly.

Outages

Again, we’ve all seen the headlines of outages, like Amazon’s 49 minute downtime costing them an estimated $4 million in lost sales. I’m not going to lie to you and say this doesn’t happen because with a quick Google search you could see I’m lying.

If your entire server, including your operating system, apps, and data, are all there together it can be backed up to an offsite data center in a matter of minutes. All from the push of a button. Make sure you have a backup plan, always. Technology is getting so smart there are ways to do this automatically do you can worry about the important stuff in life.

Also, if you’re going with a public cloud make sure you estimate the cost per minute of downtime and include that into the contract with your service provider.

What are some other cloud computing issues you’ve heard voiced? Do you have any tips on how to deal with them? Let me know by commenting on this article or letting me know on Twitter @LindseyNNelson.

When you think about crowdsourcing, what images pop into your mind?  A start-up raising capital from a community of small investors?  An online company leveraging its customers to design its T-shirts or other consumer products?  Most associate crowdsourcing with such examples involving communities of individuals, most typically involving B2C commerce.

However, the potential from crowdsourcing is just as relevant to B2B commerce.  The emergence and growth of cloud-based business networks has created global communities of companies just as diverse and accessible as communities of individuals.

Smart companies are already leveraging such networks to crowdsource, driving innovation, reducing costs and achieving a range of other benefits.  For example:

Sourcing:

• Traditionally, companies looking to negotiate new contracts would specify exactly what goods or services they needed, invite specific suppliers and bid them against each other for the lowest price.

• Today, the integration of Sourcing applications with Discovery capabilities on Business Networks has enabled a new model.  Some companies source by communicating their business requirements over networks and having suppliers (often previously unknown) compete not just by bidding prices but by suggesting the best service approach or product configuration to meet the buyer’s requirements.

• This leverages the experience of the potential supplier universe to drive innovation, reduce costs further and build collaborative relationships.

Financing:

• It’s no surprise that small or medium sized companies can struggle to obtain financing, especially in today’s credit environment.

• Mediafly, who provides innovative mixed media distribution solutions for the Fortune 1000 customers, struggled to fund large projects because costs would be incurred upfront but payment was often far into the future and unpredictable. This hurt them and their customers.

• By collaborating with existing and potential customers over networks on solutions, they now leverage dynamic discounting to receive early payment when needed to fund large projects, helping drive greater value to their customers, increase revenues and reduce financing risk.

These are just a couple of examples – the true opportunity is far greater.  So if you are engaged in B2B Commerce, why aren’t you crowdsourcing yet?

Planning to come to CeBiT in 2013?  Join the conversation in person from 10:00-11:30 on Friday, 8 March in the Center Stage session titled:  “The Power of the Cloud – The Power of the Crowd”

Connect with  Alexander on LinkedIn.

If so, you may be wondering if the time is right to put your cloud strategy into action.

You know that there are tremendous cost and convenience benefits, but have you considered these potential triggers for timing your move to the cloud?

9 Business Triggers For Timing Your Move To The Cloud

• You are a rapidly expanding entrepreneurial business and your IT infrastructure simply can’t keep up with the pace of growth

• You’ve expanded through merger & acquisitions and you need to consolidate IT infrastructure and applications across multiple companies and geographies

• Your in-house IT is simply not a core business asset

• You prefer operational expenses to capital expenses

• You need to demonstrate greater transparency and show an audit trail to investors, lenders, or regulators

• You’re preparing to take your company public

• Your hardware is due for an upgrade or your IT-sourcing agreement is up for re-bid

• The growth of your business is increasing demand for infrastructure, applications and data but you’re reluctant to expand your data center footprint

• You’ve reached end-of-life on essential software products and you’re looking for alternatives to re-investing in licenses, maintenance and new applications.

Bottomline

Any one of these business circumstances can be the trigger for activating your plan. But whatever precipitates your move to the cloud, the rationale for adopting a cloud  strategy comes down to these two fundamental business drivers:

1.) Increased business agility: cloud computing will allow your employees and business partners to collaborate more effectively and to provide better and faster service to your customers.

2.) Operational excellence: improved availability and lower cost of a cloud solution will allow you to re-invest the savings back into the business.

With foresight and planning, you can time your move to the cloud with minimal disruption to your business and fewer contractual penalties. Because you know that to remain competitive in today’s business climate, its not a matter of if but when to pull the trigger on your cloud strategy.

Check out these sources for more details:

• Beyond the Hot Air: What’s Really in Those Clouds (registration required)
• Avoiding the Hidden Costs of the Cloud (no registration required)

Join me on Twitter (@eagaines) or connect on LinkedIn or Google+.

Read more from Business Innovation >>

Hybrid clouds are a mixture combining the benefits of both a private and public cloud. As most of you know, a private cloud is a exactly what you think it is, your private cloud where you are in control. A public cloud is like a temperature controlled storage unit, you rent it, but someone else watches out for the temperature. Just like storage units, there are a ton of “providers” of these public spaces, but unlike storage, the cloud is growing.

The number of cloud service providers is growing, and each offers a very different tool or public cloud you can use. This mix has brought about a new term, hyper-hybrid cloud, where businesses want to deploy the different applications and services on different platforms.

This means a mixture of vendors and their differing technologies. Each vendor has a different infrastructure. This is one of the largest challenges with deploying a hybrid cloud method.

In order to effectively meet the challenge of managing a hybrid cloud approach, you must ensure you are doing a few things…

With your vendors

There are a ton of cloud vendors ranging from small to large sized businesses. Some specialize while others just provide, but you need to make sure you do your research when building your cloud product portfolio.

Ask key questions like:

• What’s their track record?
• What does their security look like?
• Do the license and contract terms work for your business needs?

Since you’ll be outsourcing your control over the performance, security, and compliance take the time to create a solid service level agreement with escalation processes built into place.

Be sure to include a “what happens if” there is downtime, to a natural disaster, to human error. Be imaginative with any could be escalations and don’t leave any potential problem unaddressed.

Also, set up a communication cadence. Say every two weeks with each vendor you meet to talk about what’s going on. This will ensure you have not only the discussions around potential issues, but also build that relationship with your supplier. Friendship can go a long way in an emergency.

With your IT team

You will also have to work with your internal IT department. Many will hear “third party service provider” and start to panic about their job. This doesn’t have to happen. Before you begin with your hybrid cloud, start planning opportunities for your employees to learn new skills related to what they’ll be able to do in the cloud.

Educating your team on the cloud will help as the technology is a rapidly changing one. By
keeping your employees on the front line educated with the newest infrastructure technology, your hybrid cloud will operate at its peak.

To keep your company operating at its peak though, start by moving only your lowest priority applications to the external cloud. Use this as a sandbox period, where if you are breached sensitive data will still be secure.

Hybrid cloud computing truly does provide the best of both worlds to many. However, those who are the most successful took the time to do the very things I just mentioned. Let me know if you find another way to manage the infrastructure! Best of luck!

Read more from Business Innovations >>

First, take a look at your business challenges. Any of these ring a bell?

Changing Demand. You sometimes have a surge in customer traffic, and other times you don’t. This leaves resources you’ve paid for unused.

Autonomous Access. With today’s mobile workforce your employees prefer to have access to corporate resources anytime, anywhere.

Customer Service Issues. This goes hand in hand with no restriction location access. If your sales team can’t respond to customer requests quickly, it will lose you not only customers, but brand value as well.

If so, I’ve got good news. These are just some of the many woes that can be solved by cloud computing, but you need to make sure you define your needs in a well thought out service level agreement. A strong SLA will enable you to pick a cloud service provider who can ensure your challenges are solved. And all within your predefined limits.

This takes me to my next point, choosing the right service provider. This isn’t just about who has the flashiest solution. You need to make sure they will solve the problems you need them too. Evaluating what’s out there is difficult. You need to take into account their performance, support, and security.

In regards to security, make sure you have a plan in place for backing up and securing your data. It’s no different than your personal computer. You need to make sure you back up your data. Say you try out one service provider, hate them, then want to go to another. If you don’t have a data copy, well you’re starting from scratch.

Another thing to consider is Data Loss Protection (DLP) technology. It tracks your confidential data in the case someone downloads, copy and pastes, or forwards from an email.

You may also need to integrate your data from your old in-house system to the new service. You need to have a clear plan on what you’re going to use, an API or integration services from a third-party.

Lastly, make sure you create a comprehensive cloud strategy. This will ease your implementation efforts and almost guarantee you success. It must include a deployment road map, as well as the measurable benefits you want to see in both the business and IT. Don’t forget to include training for your employees. Don’t want to throw them into the water if they can’t swim.

All of these things should help you on your journey to the cloud. If you think I forgot anything, please let me know by commenting on this article, or taking the conversation to Twitter @LindseyNNelson

According to recent research commissioned by Symantec, a whooping 83% of large enterprises acknowledge  problems with unauthorized cloud deployments.

And they aren’t alone – 70% of SMB’s also admit that they have an issue with rogue cloud implementations.

How did this become such a big problem?

Sometimes it’s just a lack of awareness – like the marketing team that sets up an unauthorized Dropbox account in order to share files with their agency partners.

But by far the most common reason given for rogue cloud deployments is to save time and money because it’s just too hard to go through IT.

Unfortunately, these unauthorized cloud projects are putting organizations at risk. Business users who do an end-run around IT don’t realize the potential consequences of their actions.

Without a complete view of the network, IT can no longer protect the company’s information assets. Symantec reports that 40 percent of those who have a problem with rogue cloud deployments experienced serious security breaches, including some very scary reports of account takeovers, defacement of web properties, and stolen products.

Compounding the complexities of back-up and recovery

These rogue cloud implementations further compound the problems faced by IT when it comes to backup and recovery of complex networks.

More than two-thirds of enterprises report using three or more solutions to back up their data. Of those who acknowledged problems with rogue cloud deployments, 40% have lost data in the cloud and two-thirds of that number saw their recovery efforts fail.

Addressing the risks of unauthorized cloud deployments

If the need for speed and agility is driving the demand for cloud, what can IT do to mitigate the risks of unauthorized cloud implementations?

The answer lies in IT policies built on people and their information needs first before technologies or platforms.

By embracing tools that are platform agnostic, IT can give business users the flexibility they require without the constraints that precipitate so many rogue cloud projects.

All it takes is a little planning

If your company is one of the more than 90% of organizations that are at least considering the cloud, you can head off potential problems with rogue cloud implementations through foresight and planning.

Putting in place a cloud solution under IT oversight with appropriate measures for back-up and recovery will greatly reduce the risks posed by unauthorized cloud implementations.

The 2013 report by Symantec is an excellent place to start – download Avoiding the Hidden Costs of the Cloud (no registration required) for full details.

———-

Join me on Twitter (@eagaines) or connect on LinkedIn or Google+.

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This global survey of 200 senior business and IT executives was conducted in December 2012, concluding in early January 2013. The largest group of respondents, 16%, came from the US, followed by Brazil, India, Mexico, and the UK, with 13% each; Germany (10%); Canada (9%); China (6%); Japan (4%); Australia (3%); and Saudi Arabia (3%).

Respondents came from several industries, including retail (28.5%), consumer products (28%), banking (25%), telecommunications (13%), and capital markets (7%).

More than one-quarter of respondents (27%) said their company had sales between $1 billion and $4.9 billion. Larger companies made a significant showing, with 10% of respondents reporting sales between $5 billion and $9.9 billion, and 12% reported over $10 billion in revenue. Small and mid-sized firms also were well represented. Nearly one in five respondents (19%) had sales of $25 million to $99 million, while 18% had sales between $100 million and $499 million, and 14% weighed in between $500 million and $999 million.

CEOs made up the largest group of respondents (25%), followed by IT infrastructure managers (19%), business unit heads (15%), and CIOs (13%). Other titles represented include COO (8%) and Chief Innovation Officer (7%), along with Developers, Chief Architects, and EVP/SVP of Technology, Operations, and Marketing. 

If that’s how you’re picking which cloud solution you’re going with, you need to be informed. Both private and public clouds have a number of good reasons why you should choose them. But one of the best things about it is you can have your cake and eat it too with a hybrid cloud.

According to the CIO Custom Solutions Group, a hybrid cloud is a mixture of both private and public clouds tied together by standardized technology. So what can a hybrid cloud provide?

Upfront Freedom

Implementing a private cloud solution is a serious undertaking. A hybrid allows you to get up and running quickly with the public cloud, while you wait for the private cloud is developed. By implementing only part of a private cloud, your infrastructure only changes slightly so no need to overhaul your existing technology.

Security, Storage and Scalability

If you know no matter what you’ll be using the cloud in some facet, a hybrid might be the best option for both storage and scalability. The public cloud operates off of a pay for what you use model, which is cost efficient if you’re not totally sure of the resources you’re going to use. Your private cloud gives you the security to store your more sensitive information or operate your mission-critical applications.

As for scalability, when you plan shorter projects you will be able to allocate resources at a lower cost by using the public cloud rather than having to use up resources for only a short amount of time.

Cloud bursting

According to TechTarget.com, cloud bursting is when, “an application runs in a private cloud or data center and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes.” Be careful which applications you choose that will hold the ability to cloud burst. It works best for ones that have simple delivery infrastructure.

The hybrid cloud really is only one way of doing things in the soon to be standard technology. Private and public clouds have their benefits as well. But before you choose any platform, keep in mind these 8 things.

Read more from Business Innovations >>

You don’t need a cord

Cloud computing allows you to access data anywhere, at any time by using a web-based application. As long as you have an internet connection, you can get your stuff.

Photo credit

If you’re using a public cloud, make sure you information is encrypted. Do your homework here. If you don’t want to take my advice, take popular tech blogger Mat Honan’s story into consideration. He may have been hacked, but all of his information was on the cloud.

Take what you put on the internet seriously. Be cautious with your social security number, credit cards, and even address. Try and stick with well-known service providers. There are a ton out there.

Put your data under the mattress

In other words, make sure you back it up. People are malicious and if you’re storing in free services like Dropbox, make sure you’ve got a copy on a hard drive somewhere.

Boost productivity in your small business

If you the owner of a startup or small business, the cloud can help you in more ways than one. It can increase collaboration, productivity, and reduce your costs. How? Your technologically adapted workers can access work anywhere at any time. They can take that document, work on it, and then get it back to their colleague within minutes.

Also, with the public cloud, most service providers only require you pay for what you use. No need to worry about budgeting your resources or pay for infrastructure costs.

Another great benefit is that you do well for the environment. Without all that costly infrastructure huffing and puffing away, you reduce electricity and lower carbon emissions.

Look at you being so sustainable!

Today, we connect online far more than in person. And we generate reams of personal data as we go, via email, blogs, Twitter.

Add to that a billion mobile phones and new sensors to connect cars, refrigerators, TVs, even houses. We are generating so much data via the Internet that it is nearly as much as all of the words ever spoken.

How we manage that data efficiently via cloud computing was the focus of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) Cloud and Big Data Forum. Technologists gathered to explore how big data analytics is emerging as the “killer app” for the cloud.

Data is now driving scientific discovery, converging the physical and life sciences. Researchers no longer start with a hypothesis. They examine the data first, then hypothesize what it shows.

But answering science’s largest questions will require interconnected clouds that operate on data simultaneously or move partial results back and forth.

And in future, 80% of cloud workloads will come from other clouds. So interoperability standards will be key.

Interconnected clouds might be needed to predict and manage global disasters, simulate astrophysics models or deliver remote specialized medical care.

As noted by keynote speaker Vint Cerf, a founding father of the Internet and Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, interconnected clouds are in the “same state of infancy as the Internet was in the 1970s.”

Interconnected clouds are an aspirational goal in NIST’s definition of the hybrid cloud. As an early Internet user, NIST has been researching cybersecurity, identity management and other topics that enable hybrid.

The hybrid cloud includes “two or more distinct cloud infrastructures bound together by standardized or proprietary technology to enable data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).”

In talking with Tim Grance, NIST co-author of the definition, and NIST security expert Lee Badger, what began as an effort with co-author Peter Mell to understand cloud computing became a universal description of what cloud is – and what to do with it.

As NIST consulted with government and industry, the definition expanded. Its modularity in matching services to deployment models is meant to spark new business models that can be implemented quickly.

NIST’s ultimate vision for the cloud is to take a workload and move it anywhere, within one’s cost and security requirements. This would drive powerful efficiency in today’s IT infrastructure and foster healthy market competition. As Tim noted, market forces will further interpret the definition over time.

While industry has first gravitated towards public cloud services, government has gravitated towards private or community cloud services. Now each is exploring the other XaaS/deployment combinations as well.

Today, NIST’s flexible definition of cloud is embraced all over the world. Both commercial and public sectors use it to assess which cloud solutions might best enhance operations or drive business growth.

The value of NIST’s definition is how it will lead to metrics and standards that harmonize global cloud connectivity. As Vint Cerf summarized in his keynote, if we “push the boundaries of cloud computing … the opportunities are enormous … and there for all of us.”

Cloud computing is a much hyped but often misunderstood technology that is gaining traction in different industries around the world. Businesses are integrating the cloud into countless systems, from HR to finance. Full adoption and acceptance of cloud computing, however, are still far away.

A recent global survey by Knowledge@Wharton and SAP’s Performance Benchmarking team reveals that while the hype and excitement surrounding cloud computing is reaching a fever pitch, many businesses are still expressing concerns over cloud security and IT integration issues. The survey also shows that while many people agree that the cloud is revolutionizing business, they still do not fully understand how it works.

How will these tensions surrounding the cloud be resolved? How will the cloud transform businesses in the future? What kinds of benefits will the cloud bring, and is it worthy of the current hype? Knowledge@Wharton discussed those questions and the survey results with David Spencer, vice president at SAP, and Don Huesman, managing director at the Wharton Innovation Group.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: When it comes to hybrid solutions, are there some areas where it’s easier to move things into the cloud than others? This relates to one more finding in our survey where 75% of the participants said they thought cloud computing meets minimal business needs. Could you speak to that?

Spencer: Well, if you take SAP as an example, we offer cloud applications in four big areas, focusing on the parts of our customers’ business that are most important to them: people, money, suppliers and customers. We’re also integrating social aspects into these cloud services. For example, we offer collaboration rooms where teams can work together to address customers’ needs. We build the analytics and we also build in the mobile applications in these systems.

The reason I mention this is because not all customers want to use the entire suite of cloud offerings. They may just want to take one application, such as expense reporting, and put it in the cloud. But then this service has to be integrated with other business applications that are not in the cloud.

Knowledge@Wharton: Don, do have anything to add?

Huesman: There are some types of document storage services that are easily moved to the cloud that might fall under the “minimal business needs” category. While some businesses in health care and law, for example, may not be able to use this kind of service due to strict regulations, other companies in other industries may find that this kind of document management system is easily moved to the cloud. This service can free up a lot of internal IT resources and can be quite beneficial in terms of savings and redeploying talent to tackle other issues within the organization.

Knowledge@Wharton: I’d like to end with some questions related to the future of cloud computing. Nearly 70% of survey respondents said that they believe cloud computing will lead to major changes in their company’s performance over the next five years. What changes do you envision and how will they come about?

Spencer: With the cloud, we are seeing people deploy technology faster and realize and recognize revenue and benefits faster. The cloud enables companies to access their customers in a way that is faster, more dynamic, more flexible and less expensive, and the system is integrated with existing infrastructure. People are also willing to make investments in cloud computing because it offers a flexible payment cycle. Furthermore, what may have taken years to build beforehand can now be done in months.

Huesman: The possible future that I see emerging is an extension of what has happened in the music industry with the development of iTunes. This classic cloud service disrupted and changed the dynamic for the music infrastructure providers. It extended music to a much larger number of providers, and it disintermediated some of the traditional businesses that controlled global music distribution. I wonder what that might look like in the space of productivity suites and enterprise resource packages. Is it possible we might see the emergence of an ecosystem of products that would allow for much broader competition? As I mentioned earlier, I think the cloud will contribute to downward pricing pressure.

Knowledge@Wharton: Which industries are ripe for that kind of disruption, thanks to cloud computing?

Huesman: I think education is in a position to finally be affected by the Internet. The classroom of today looks very much like it did in the 19th century, but I think that’s beginning to change. The change is partially due to cloud-based services, which allow the highest-quality classroom curricula to be compiled together and offered to organizations for free.

In terms of business, I think IT will become more streamlined and become more of a commodity service, which will cause downward pressure on IT expenses.

Knowledge@Wharton: That’s very interesting. Nearly 60% of our respondents believe that cloud computing will bring about precisely that kind of cost saving and encourage more business agility. Now I’d like to end by discussing how we might climb down from the “mountain of hype,” as Don said earlier, to the “plateau of productivity?” How can this be implemented in a way that delivers real value to companies?

Huesman: I’ve often been involved in projects where people hoped that an IT investment or a change in IT infrastructure would generate significant savings. But I have seldom seen that happen. However, I do see instances when deploying a new technology has provided businesses with an agility that makes them more competitive. That changes the game. While the focus on cost savings is very attractive to senior management, I would instead encourage them to focus on how the cloud can increase their agility to produce new services and new products of value for their customers.

Spencer: Let’s look at three things: agility, speed and investment in technology. In terms of agility, we see the cloud as being able to quickly deploy processes that are integrated with current systems. In terms of speed, you can deploy cloud processes so much quicker that traditional processes. From an investment standpoint, people are more willing to take on smaller cloud deployments and then ramp up and build on that success as they go.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you agree that the opportunity to increase agility is higher than the ability to bring about cost savings?

Huesman: That’s been my experience in working with companies.

Spencer: I think it’s a combination of both.

This is part three of a three-part series. Check out parts one and two.

Cloud computing is a much hyped but often misunderstood technology that is gaining traction in different industries around the world. Businesses are integrating the cloud into countless systems, from HR to finance. Full adoption and acceptance of cloud computing, however, are still far away.

A recent global survey by Knowledge@Wharton and SAP’s Performance Benchmarking team reveals that while the hype and excitement surrounding cloud computing is reaching a fever pitch, many businesses are still expressing concerns over cloud security and IT integration issues. The survey also shows that while many people agree that the cloud is revolutionizing business, they still do not fully understand how it works.

How will these tensions surrounding the cloud be resolved? How will the cloud transform businesses in the future? What kinds of benefits will the cloud bring, and is it worthy of the current hype? Knowledge@Wharton discussed those questions and the survey results with David Spencer, vice president at SAP, and Don Huesman, managing director at the Wharton Innovation Group.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: Both of you have spelled out of the value of cloud computing. But one of the counterintuitive findings in our survey showed that while many people believe that cloud computing is important, they don’t seem to understand much about it. Don, why do you think this is the case?

Huesman: I just mentioned the Gartner “hype cycle.” Gartner showed 2012 as the time when the hype slipped off the peak and headed towards “the trough of disillusionment,” which they think is a necessary phase for any type of effective technology before it reaches what they refer to as “the plateau of productivity.” And Gartner is predicting that to happen with cloud computing over the next two to five years.

Related to this “hype cycle,” I think that there is a tendency, particularly in the United States, to look for technical solutions to multi-dimensional problems and get very excited about the solutions, until we begin to see some limitations. Then we get very disappointed, until we eventually discover that there is still a decent amount of utility to take advantage of in these technical solutions. So, in this case, I don’t know that the first-mover advantage in this space is very strong because I think close followers can also take advantage of the new capabilities that are emerging.

Knowledge@Wharton: Dave, what’s your view?

Spencer: I think one of the reasons there is general confusion has to do with the fact that there are different definitions that are used when referring to cloud computing. For example, there is SaaS (software as service), there is a virtualization of an environment, there are also hosting environments. This leads to confusion because there are different kinds of cloud solutions. In fact, at SAP we try to describe it in terms of value across our customers’ entire enterprise, and even beyond. We talk about our cloud portfolio consisting of four main elements: apps, cloud platform, infrastructure/lifecycle management, for investment protection, and finally, the business network, which refers to networks of buyers and sellers doing business in entirely new, social ways, all enabled by cloud computing.

Knowledge@Wharton: Interesting. Perhaps this lack of understanding could be related to this finding from our survey: 18% of companies said they had extensively or completely adopted cloud computing, but half the respondents had minimal or no adoption. Could this general misunderstanding about cloud computing be related to the fact that not many people are using it?

Spencer: If I look at the customers that I represent, most have adopted some kind of cloud solution or at least have looked at it. Now, they may not have deployed it 100% because they may have started out using the cloud solution in smaller organizations or smaller businesses processes, but every day I see people looking at deploying some kind of cloud solution.

I think the other factor is that if you’re looking at larger organizations, they would have already made sizeable investments in their IT infrastructure, so quickly moving to a cloud solution may not be the best investment for them right now. What a lot of companies are looking at is called the hybrid solution, where they are taking select business processes and putting them into the cloud, while still leveraging their on-premise IT infrastructure at the same time.

Huesman: Dave has touched on an important point here. I think there is often resistance on the part of IT departments in some companies towards the concept of the cloud. This resistance is based on concerns about security, reliability, dependability and the robustness of the solutions that are being offered. But I think all those concerns are overstated. The current resistance reminds me of when the personal computer was introduced. Large companies resisted its deployment for a very long time until personal computers were being purchased by CEOs. At that point, the IT organizations had to figure out a way to integrate them successfully. I think we’re seeing a similar dynamic now where there is resistance for legitimate concerns, but that’s being trumped by consumerization.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you expect to see CEOs in the cloud soon?

Huesman: Oh, I’ve seen them there every day.

Spencer: On my side, I can say that we run our business in the cloud 100%. Every single business process in the SAP cloud business unit, from travel to HR, is being run in the cloud.

Knowledge@Wharton: Dave, for those who are resisting cloud solutions, some of the biggest concerns seem to be around security and integration. In fact, 67% of survey respondents identified those two issues as the ones that concerned them the most. How do you deal with this?

Spencer: We try to address the security issue head-on to understand our customers’ exact concerns. Now, there are different privacy laws in different countries, which we’ve been able to satisfy. But there are some companies and government agencies that have very strict policies around what can be run on the cloud and what cannot. So, we try to address these issues. But at the end of the day, it really comes down to that fact that some people are just going to be cloud laggards. For those people who are going to be at the back-end of the curve in deployments, you just have to make sure they are comfortable when they’re ready.

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think, Don?

Huesman: We were one of the first organizations at Penn to attempt to outsource our student email to a cloud service provided by Microsoft, but we had a bad experience early on. It was so bad that we had to move back to our previous system. That early mover experience leaves people nervous about making the move again. But now we’re at a point where outsourcing e-mail is something that can be done in a more reliable fashion.

These issues make IT directors and IT workers believe that it’s better to work through the late night hours to repair and reconfigure hardware and software services rather than wait on the phone anxiously hoping that someone else in another distant city is fixing the issue. It’s a different position to be in psychologically. It may also be a challenge for IT employees to be able to work in partnership with a cloud services company. Not all people will be ready for this shift. It’s certainly a period of transition in the IT industry.

Knowledge@Wharton: Dave, do you encounter some of the issues that Don just described? How do you deal with them?

Spencer: We deal with these issues every single day. We look at this as a true partnership: The clients working with SAP have to feel comfortable that they’re working with a responsive business that is going to continue to deliver innovation and improve security. Our customers want a business partner that can handle all aspects of the cloud. For example, SAP has to proactively deal with issues related to deploying business applications on personal mobile devices and controlling the data that’s out there. That’s one area where SAP is very advanced.

This is part two of a three-part series. Stay tuned for part three.

What does the cloud mean to you?

What it means to me is being able to get the right data at the right time to the right people. The cloud allows you to conduct your business anytime and anywhere, like setting up and aligning your goals, conducting your performance reviews, etc. You can use a mobile device, tablet, or whatever you need.

While being mobile is big for me, I also love how you can run your business much more efficiently with the cloud. You don’t need a bunch of employees working on the back-end to make these systems operate.

Before I worked at SuccessFactors, I had little interaction with the cloud in my previous jobs. Now, I only need the IT group for a few things; and we can basically manage and administer the systems in finance ourselves.

So it really is about the total cost of ownership. You can drive down expenses and be much more efficient by configuring your systems when you want it and the way you want it.

Furthermore, you can watch the rapid innovation of cloud based vendors and drive this innovation to your needs because they deliver functionality improvements much more rapidly than anything in-house or in on-premise systems.

How has the cloud affected your work personally?

Personally, it has made me much more efficient in my job. Twenty years ago, I had to come to the office to work. Now, I don’t need go into the office; I can be anywhere! I can work using my phone, traveling on an airplane, or hanging out by the beach. I take my job wherever I go. While e-mail is accessible everywhere, so are cloud based products. I can do an expense report in no time. I just snap a shot of my expenses, save it, get back to the office, and put it in my report. Just like that, I’m done, and I get reimbursed. It’s that easy!

What cloud based solutions do you value?

I really believe in SAP Financials OnDemand because everybody should have their own dashboard to manage their tasks, self-serve on reports that are relevant to them and be able collaborate with others.

You don’t want to operate in a black box; you want to have a transparent workspace where you can contribute to a team and influence projects quickly. And that’s what we get with cloud: through your dashboard and the reports and KPI’s, you can see what needs to be done and cover your teammates if they’re sick or behind in their work as well as see if there are issues that need to be addressed immediately in the business. The transparency provided by these tools is what I see as cloud.

I also love how all these tools can be well integrated. You can go buy different systems and integrate them together, so that you get one master source of information without worrying about whether or not your team’s files are synced. You get that kind of convenience with the cloud, and you make your operations more efficient. You just have to be cognizant of maintaining your integration tools.

What does the future hold for the cloud?

Today, cloud is a new thing. There are so many cloud based applications coming out, both social and cloud are adopting fast and innovating fast. Will that be the case in 20 years? Possibly, but I don’t know what it will be. What’s exciting about these times is the rapid pace of new technologies and attempting to keep up with them.

This post originally appeared on the SAP Community Network and is reprinted here with permission.

Cloud computing is a much hyped but often misunderstood technology that is gaining traction in different industries around the world. Businesses are integrating the cloud into countless systems, from HR to finance. Full adoption and acceptance of cloud computing, however, are still far away.

A recent global survey by Knowledge@Wharton and SAP’s Performance Benchmarking team reveals that while the hype and excitement surrounding cloud computing is reaching a fever pitch, many businesses are still expressing concerns over cloud security and IT integration issues. The survey also shows that while many people agree that the cloud is revolutionizing business, they still do not fully understand how it works.

How will these tensions surrounding the cloud be resolved? How will the cloud transform businesses in the future? What kinds of benefits will the cloud bring, and is it worthy of the current hype? Knowledge@Wharton discussed those questions and the survey results with David Spencer, vice president at SAP, and Don Huesman, managing director at the Wharton Innovation Group.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: Knowledge@Wharton and SAP’s Performance Benchmarking team just conducted a survey about the business value of cloud computing. The survey found that 85% of respondents believe that cloud computing will transform business. Could you speak to us about how cloud computing can make a company more competitive by leading to measurable efficiencies and improving business processes?

David Spencer: There are three areas specifically where the cloud can help our customers be more competitive. One: The Cloud gives individuals better access to areas of their business that the traditional business model previously didn’t give them access to. Two: The speed at which you can deploy a solution gives cloud users an opportunity to realize revenue or benefits much more quickly. Three: The cloud is delivered in a way that makes the total cost of ownership much better. Also, in my opinion, the user interface is more flexible, and it is much easier to deploy.

Knowledge@Wharton: Could you offer any examples of companies where you see this happening?

Spencer: I’ll give you an example of a customer that just recently deployed our Customer OnDemand solution and did it in two weeks. The customer came back to us and said, ‘If we had done this using a traditional model, it would have taken us six months to a year. You’ve done this in two weeks!’ The deployment was completed faster than any other traditional model that was out there. As for the cost — because it’s a variable cost versus a fixed cost, they were able to budget the cost over multiple years instead of taking all the costs upfront.

Knowledge@Wharton: Don, any comments?

Don Huesman: From the Wharton side, I can tell you that the cloud has provided an opportunity for entrepreneurial-minded students with new ventures to establish fairly sophisticated capabilities quite quickly and on a relatively low start-up budget. The cloud allows them to quickly enter a marketplace or put together a platform for delivering a new service at speeds that were not possible before the existence of cloud services. The cloud has certainly provided agility for these entrepreneurs. It creates a more level playing field, and thereby generates more competition.

For example, ElectNext is an enterprise that was established to solve the problem in this country of having an essentially broken political system. By using the cloud, the organizers could efficiently respond to the level of site usage and the level of infrastructure that they needed at any one time. They added on new servers when they found that service was slowing as a result of inadequate resources. In the past, this wasn’t possible. You might have needed to make a guesstimate about possible incoming site traffic and acquired hardware and talented software people to handle this. Now you can respond almost in real time to changes in site demand.

Knowledge@Wharton: Back to you, Dave. Some 65% of survey respondents said that cloud computing would amplify other technology megatrends. Could you tell us which megatrends will be amplified, and how this might happen?

Spencer: Yes. Let’s talk about mobile, social media and big data. We’re seeing more data coming into companies. For example, people are constantly talking about company interactions and opinions on Twitter, Facebook and other sites. Now companies have a massive amount of data that need to be analyzed. One implication that I’m seeing is that companies have to take a more holistic view of their branding. They have unprecedented access to their customers via social media, and individual customers can heavily influence other customers. Now companies can individually market themselves based upon market trends that are going on.

I’ll give you an example of where I’m going with this. Recently, the NFL decided to use SAP’s cloud solutions to run their Fantasy Football service. That’s accessing four million users. The NFL’s IT division may not have had the infrastructure designed to support that before, but because of cloud computing, big data and social trends, they now have an opportunity to market individually to people.

Knowledge@Wharton: Don, do any examples of megatrends come to your mind?

Huesman: One megatrend that is central to cloud computing has been referred to in the press as the consumerization of IT. Before I go further, I would like to note that cloud services have been around a long time. They are a 20th century innovation. Gartner has just indicated that we’re currently at the top of the “hype cycle” for the concept of cloud computing. I think it’s related to the consumerization forces. So, Drop Box and other cloud services for e-mail have enabled both individuals and businesses to take control of their own IT infrastructure needs. I think this force of consumerization has been a real driver in why cloud computing is so interesting now.

Spencer: Adding onto that, the cloud was originally designed for small companies. It all started with non-strategic applications for smaller companies. But over the last couple of years, we have seen larger companies start to see the model and understand how it fits into their business. Now what you’re seeing is even larger companies running their entire HR systems in the cloud. Larger companies are, without a doubt, adopting cloud solutions more than ever.

Knowledge@Wharton: Related to your comment, our survey found that 66% of respondents said that cloud computing is helping their companies create new, strategic options. HR is one of those options. Are there any other strategic options that cloud computing opens up for companies? What value does that create for the users?

Spencer: HR and sales automation are the two that have gotten a lot of attention. But I’ll go back to what Don said, too — it’s also the commercialization piece of this puzzle. Companies are now tailoring marketing directly to customers, who influence other customers.

Knowledge@Wharton: Don, what do you think about the strategic options?

Huesman: From the point of view of students and start-ups, the consumerization of IT is an important component. The cloud provides application software that can be used on hand-held devices — such as iPads and Android — and this allows a mix of vendors to provide very specific types of application software through an app store. I see this as an opportunity to change the market for traditional enterprise services by broadening the vendor base and increasing competition. Also, I should point out that in an app store environment, and as a part of the consumerization of IT, there will be downward pressure on pricing.

This is part one of a three-part series. Stay tuned for part two.

I’ve written frequently on how cloud is a disruptive technology, but now let’s talk about how it’s altering your business.

Now I know what you’re thinking, this doesn’t or won’t ever affect me. In reality, cloud computing isn’t just changing the role of developers; it is changing the role of your marketers, your sales force. And in the coming years, even the roles that having seemingly nothing to do with cloud will be affected. There are of course the skeptics, but here are a few ways it’ll transform the business.

IT for Everyone

It’s no longer up to the IT department to make decisions on which software will be used. Shadow IT is lurking in every department where 30% of IT spending being done is happening outside the official IT budget. You don’t need any approval; just a credit card and a third party service provider can deliver your department the cloud computing software it needs to run quicker.

Quicker Time to Innovation

Budgets and project timelines are two hot topics, or should I say issues, in the IT and Business world. Who is going to pay for what? And how many man hours will it take? Cloud computing helps reduce both. This in turn gives companies the ability to experiment with wild ideas. It cuts down the time of testing and simulation.

Do It Yourself

We all know the common complaint about the IT department. It takes weeks to get something done, even if it’s critical to the business, because they’re overworked understaffed. When your company has its data stored in the cloud, it makes it easier for the end users to create a front-end of what they want.

Technology for All

Gone are the days of divide between the suits and the techies. Take a look at your kids, nieces, nephews, basically anyone under the age of 16 and you’ll see they are already a part of the technology culture that’s upon us. Our future business leaders will lead with technology like the cloud. Cloud computing gives companies an advantage to do things quicker and with less red tape.

This alteration won’t happen overnight, but it will continue to be a key aspect of the future business. It will affect job descriptions, and if I were you, I’d get on-board. Check out the Business Innovation Cloud section to get up to speed.

Want to continue the conversation? Let’s chat about it on Twitter @LindseyNNelson