This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

This year, a majority of cloud spending is coming from the corporate IT budget rather than business unit people buying SaaS on the side, which you saw in years past. More and more, FinancialForce.com is being introduced to customers by the IT department. A number of years ago, the IT group saw the cloud as a threat, but now IT actually sees the cloud as strategic and something that they can evolve around as well. They are clearly starting to embrace it. I see that there is a distinct move towards corporate budgets buying these cloud solutions now, not departmental budgets trying to work their way around IT departments. This starts to take us close to a tipping point, where people are using cloud technologies, not as a sideline, but as a mainstream part of their business. From an IT spending perspective, I suspect that we are going to see more spending on cloud technology and we’re going to see IT budgets increasingly allocated to it, rather than cloud expensed ad hoc against departmental budgets.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media, enterprise social media in particular, is coming along at the right time. Companies today are increasingly leveraging virtual business models utilizing more subcontractors, home workers and geographically dispersed employees. Social media apps like Chatter do a great job of connecting people and the business information held in your business applications, regardless of where they sit in the world or where they sit on the organization chart.

That’s almost an expectation in something like the professional services space. I think this is why you will see professional services organizations lead in the adoption of social media in businesses. They have the killer use case for social media. They operate virtually and work in teams. In that business, your teams need to be in synch and collaborate in real time across sales, services and finance. The project work is social by nature, so the lines need to blur across teams and encompass the customer. We are very focused on this area and are delivering innovative applications to help our customers collaborate not just internally, but also collaborate more closely with their customers. For instance, FinancialForce.com’s professional services customers are using Chatter to follow project activity on a project wall, so that disparate teams can monitor a project’s progress and gain visibility to project management conversations.

When you think about it, most companies are working “socially” already, but they are doing it the hard way – conference calls, voice mail, IM and email. Worse, those conversations are all disconnected from core business systems, with no audit trail and no connection to customer or project data. It is difficult to run a virtual company this way. Companies are using really expensive, hardworking people to bridge the technological data gaps with phone calls.

So, I think we will see collaboration and social apps become even more mainstream inside companies in the coming years. I think business people had a hard time grasping why they would need Facebook or Twitter-like functions inside their companies. I fault the industry for selling it that way. Tools like Chatter are encouraging collaboration inside companies in ways we haven’t seen before and it is paying off in a big way. FinancialForce.com customers are breaking down the barriers between sales and accounting, for instance, to help collect cash and reduce bad debt as a team, and essentially providing a better service to their customers.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Without question, mobile is now part of enterprise IT planning. Mobile devices will soon become a primary way people consume cloud applications. We’re going to see a lot more action around tablets with mobile applications and analysts predict that there will be more than 20 times the current amount of mobile cloud based applications by 2014. Technology is changing the way we socialize and the way we socialize is influencing the way we build and use technology. We have several apps on the drawing board for 2012, including some designed exclusively for senior managers and some for field employees, such as doing project time entry from your mobile phone.

As such, I see the conversations on cloud as a topic going down, and the conversations on mobile and social applications coming up, although the cloud is the enabler. There is much more to these applications than just being in the cloud in an IT sense – there is genuine business value in them and there are genuine ways for people to innovate.

Our customers may be visiting a client, for example, and want to know the current payment status before they walk into the meeting; or they may be on the road, but need access to the latest KPI’s and financial reports. FinancialForce Mobile leverages the Force.com mobile application platform, enabling customers to use a variety of mobile devices including Blackberries, iPhones and iPads to access financial and project data. Essentially, FinancialForce.com mobile applications enable customers to access accounting and project services information anytime, anywhere, boosting productivity and saving valuable time.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Let’s Talk: Making B2B Apps More Social

Go to just about any business event, attend a webinar, download an ebook or whitepaper, and social media invariably comes up.

And it’s for good reason. From a business perspective, social connects us to prospects and customers like never before. When people make decisions about where they are going to eat, what hotel they will book, what conference to attend, and, yes, what vendor they’ll sign with, that decision is increasingly a social one. We want to know what our network of friends and colleagues think.

That has changed the game for app developers, who are increasingly designing in an interconnected ecosystem. Consider this: 20 million Facebook apps are installed each day. Clearly, people like it when their apps connect with their social world.

So our expectations have shifted. That apps work together seamlessly is taken for granted. My Spotify will tell my Facebook friends what I’m listening to. I can update Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously from TweetDeck. Edits to a Google Doc can be done right from my Box account.

Our apps are not social simply because they push status updates to Facebook, but because they communicate with each other. I push a button in this app and it updates another app. It just works.
While this is the norm when it comes to consumer apps, the B2B industry has been slower to accept this change. The B2B infrastructure is fragmented. For too long, companies developed services as if they were in a vacuum, designing products that solve one particular pain point without thought for how it would work in the larger app marketplace.

That’s too bad because if anyone needs social apps, its B2B customers. We deal with long, often complicated sales cycles. To win these deals we deploy an always-growing selection of apps to grab buyers’ attention, educate them and earn their trust. But when these apps live in a silo, unable to talk to each other, we’re left with spotty data, a pile of spreadsheets and incomplete picture of the targeted buyer’s behavior.

In other words, if the attendee data from the webinar I just ran doesn’t connect with the platform I used to market that event and the CRM my sales team is logging into every day, I’m just painting by numbers. I can’t see how the different apps I’m running are impacting the sale. And without knowing the revenue the app helps generate, the harder it is to justify paying for it.

The industry is adapting. Expect more announcements about developer centers and centralized marketplaces where apps work in concert. Features like social sign-on, which make life easier for the buyer and the seller, are taking root. An email sent from iPad can get recorded in my marketing automation and CRM systems.

Put simply, B2B apps need to be more social. The market demands it. As social media alters the professional landscape, apps give us the ability to adapt on the fly. But not if they only work boxed up in a vendor’s platform.

It won’t be enough to create a “cool” app this year. In 2012, the killer app is integration.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Which markets will provide the best opportunities for tech companies in the next five years and why:

One of the most important emerging trends in software today is true healthcare IT innovation. Traditionally, innovation and healthcare infrastructure simply did not go together. Innovation in healthcare was in drug discovery and medical devices. Healthcare IT was the red headed stepchild, dominated by legacy vendors. It would be as if Siebel still ruled the CRM roost.

A new generation of companies is changing that, driving new investment dollars and interest into the sector. A combination of demographics and regulation are creating an appetite in the healthcare industry for change.

First, there is the unavoidable math of an aging population and expanding healthcare needs. The cost pressures are far outstripping anyone’s budget expectations. As a result, innovation in how information is shared and used is a natural option for trying to control costs.

Second, the government has pushed the healthcare industry to develop more open standards and share more data. Putting aside the most controversial elements of the healthcare reform, the Government already pays more than 50 cents of every healthcare dollar in reimbursements. As a result, government mandates to share information and to provide more visibility in pricing and healthcare results will not go away.

As a result of these trends, hospitals are changing the way they think about the role of healthcare innovation and are starting to consider SaaS systems to give them the same flexibility that other enterprises have found with innovations in CRM and ERP.

The next five years will be a critical time as these innovations take root and find their own particular place in the healthcare universe, where privacy concerns and other factors make it a challenging, but very rewarding IT environment.

How do I see the role of the IT department evolving:

In no area is the IT landscape changing faster than in healthcare. For years, healthcare IT was not considered the sexy part of healthcare. Drug discovery and medical devices captured the VC innovation dollars. Although IT supported these advances, the IT Departments were not center stage.

That is no longer true as the best and the brightest find themselves attracted to the challenges of healthcare IT and its critical role in controlling costs, improving patient access and ensuring lifesaving information can be delivered to and shared by those who need it.

As a result, the healthcare IT departments are finding themselves in uncharted waters. Most importantly, they are moving away from traditional enterprise systems and exploring cloud-based solutions. These take the form of SaaS software solutions as well as hybrid cloud solutions, where highly-available configurations enable large amounts of data to be available closest to the point of care.

Cloud solutions are essential for the reducing cost, but IT teams need to understand the privacy and access control implications of these solutions. Granular business rules and innovative authentication schema (think on-line banking) are enabling healthcare departments to grant access to those who need it, while safeguarding privacy. Regulatory mandates, such as HIPPA, require that healthcare providers not only abide by rigorous privacy regimes, but maintain audit records so that they can prove compliance.

Pure cloud solutions, however, do not always work for healthcare, simply because of the amount of data involved and the just-in-time nature of healthcare delivery. Although some healthcare record data resembles any other piece of business data, healthcare information, such as diagnostic imaging, produces immense file sizes in complex formats. Imagine that you are a surgeon working in an operating room and you need to see an MRI right away. If that MRI was done at your hospital, the logical thing is for you to be able to access it locally. Alternatively, if you are working with a patient, who has been transferred from another hospital, you want to be able to access that image from the cloud, so that you can avoid physically transferring a film or CD from another hospital. This is the perfect kind of scenario for a hybrid cloud solution with business logic to ensure that images are always transmitted in the most intelligent way.

Challenges about data access and sharing are going to continue to accentuate the strategic importance of healthcare IT departments. Seeking innovative solutions is going to be a top priority. Successful implementation will be core to a hospitals success.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

This is one of the most exciting times to be in IT. The cloud is showing the promise of completely shifting the 80/20 paradox in which IT currently spends 80% of their time and money is spent on maintenance, and only 20% on innovation. The cloud enables a shift into IT being more innovative and agile, resulting in greater productivity and moving IT up the value chain into a much more strategic position. True cloud solutions are also proving that they increase time-to-value as compared to their enterprise equivalents, and are thus empowering IT to achieve their desired service levels while being more innovative.

Secondly, the traditional functions and skill sets of IT professionals will shift over time as well, with business process expertise becoming more of their emphasis. Some of the traditional blocking and tackling functions of IT, such as OS and database work, will shift to cloud services. This represents a significant new set of skills that IT will need to learn, providing them with an even richer skill set.

On the application side, IT will move away from installation and coding and into cloud solutions and vendor management. They are still on the hook for upgrades and change control but this is coordinated with the cloud providers vs. performed internally. The net result is that IT will evolve into an “internal” version what Gartner calls a Cloud Service Broker; aggregating, integrating and customizing will become their focus and imperative as IT moves into the cloud.

What’s the future for hybrid cloud strategies?

The hybrid cloud has at least a 10-year horizon. Companies really need to think about their business need and how to move from their current infrastructure to one that’s cloud-based.

The adoption of hybrid cloud strategies has a correlation to the size of the company. Small to mid-sized companies tend to have fewer applications that need to be integrated or moved to the cloud, so they can aggressively make the shift. Mid-market to enterprise companies tend to have a large number of applications and systems that are built on a more complex infrastructure; these companies need to move to the cloud in phases, which makes the timeline longer, and necessitates some type of hybrid cloud. For instance, larger companies tend to take their on-premise applications, move them to a private cloud infrastructure, and de-commission some of the old infrastructure as a phase one. This sets the stage for a move to a 100% cloud-based delivery model. The transition may take several years, but the hybrid cloud as transitional for moving to the cloud, as the full transition to the cloud, will yield the greatest ongoing value to the business.

The mega-vendors are buying up pure-play SaaS companies. Will they succeed in using those acquisitions to help change their companies to the SaaS culture and business model?

No one knows the answer to this question for sure, but it seems to be a smart strategy, especially if the acquirers follow some key steps.

First, don’t mess with success. The mega-vendor made the acquisition for a reason, and with the assumption that the acquired company has figured out a model that’s working. The mega-vendor needs to allow the acquired company to manage itself and thrive as its own autonomous business unit to make this model work. It really comes down to the culture: if the mega-vendor allows its new business unit to continue to operate in a way that’s been successful – and if they can align their businesses from revenue recognition, go-to-market, marketing and sales perspectives – it works. If the mega-vendor expects the acquired company to assimilate into their culture, however, this business model is less likely to prove successful.

The mega-vendor also needs to keep the acquired company’s leadership team intact as much as possible, and then give them a seat at their table so they can have a high degree of influence over the direction of the company.

Of course all of this assumes that the mega-vendor is factoring in a few important considerations before making the acquisition, such as:

• They’re serious about the cloud
• They have a roadmap for success
• They have a strategy around the pure-play SaaS company they acquired, from a technology and platform perspective
• They truly embrace all that the acquired company has to offer

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware