After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Using Cloud to Manage Business Growth Presentation.
Moderator: Michael Pearl, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Speakers: Nara Balakrishna (Appirio), Guy Shani (Clarizen), Gil Zimmermann (CloudLock)
Discussion Points:
- Mike help client leverage cloud to drive their business
- Nara – Cloud solution provided, help mid size companies to move to cloud. How he uses cloud to run his buinses
- Guy – collaborative online project management services. 1600 customers (midsize to large companies). How his company leverages cloud to drive his business
- Gill – Cloud data security. Help leverages enterprise leverages the cloud secured way. 100s of enterprise customer, millions of users use cloud securely.
- How to leverage the cloud to manage the growth of the company
- Support millions of users without having a single server
- Continuously innovate, continuously provide value to customer
- Built on Google App engine, so not need to focus on infrastructure management, just focus on software development
- Share some experiences about connectivity and collaboration across the org
- Disparate group across many geographical locations. Use own solution to communicate and collaborate with own employees.
- Also other cloud based solution like Saleforce, Marketo etc
- Only 100+ employees but supporting many customer world wide
- Nara sharing perspective of how Appirio grown and how you managing your customer
- 3 guys supporting 500 people
- all project run using own solution build cloud based solution
- Able to move quickly (on baording new employees, )
- Spend a little less on IT
- Some challenge from IT organization that you serve (how do they respond)
- How you go around IT
- IT leader recognize the shift in market
- 70/75% spending keeping their lights on
- Moving form IT maintenance to innovative business solution
- Guy’s perspective
- 5 years ago only early adopters SAAS based model for project management
- More streamlined a way to deliver cloud based solutions
- Is SAAS the right vehicle no longer a concern
- SAAS is valid option to consider
- Spend more time focusing on the right solution
- Security and Risk Management (how customers manage this aspect)
- CIO stands for Chief Information Officer (Not infrastructure office)
- CIOs need to make sure information available securely
- Making sure IT provide the best application
- People will find a way collaborate, so CIO need to enable cloud based solutions that are secured from the company data point of view
- Dropbox are users breaking corporate policy
- How can do things before and do more securely on the cloud
- Future of IT (two path for IT organization)
- One – strives for best of breed technologies
- Other – will just keeps the light on
- Roles are changing
- Example of most innovative way to leverage cloud
- 2 examples – Helping twitter to scale from few sales force to 100s of salesforce. Helping them implement tool like Salesforce.com and other cloud based solution
- How clients are using project management tools:
- Immediately value is people are using the tool, more adoption among users
- Managers have full visibility to data that was not there before
- Help make real time decision
- Cut timesheet process to days to hours
- Customers (Marketo) are teaching them how to best to use theirs own software
- How customers learned more about the information using Cloudlook
- 60 seconds to instal in any size organization
- Data on the dashboard is eye opener for the customer
- Moving from windows based servers to cloud based solutions
- Once organization gone from traditional file servers application to Google Apps, it is very hard to go back.
- Paradigm shift, data does not belong to server anymore.
- Perspective on cloud adoption of companies that already invested heavily on Legacy applications
- Collecting information from the different system and putting in front of users. Start with that then extend to other services. (Front office first, collaboration second, HR and other services next)