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

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.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

In looking back at this decade, the ability for a decision maker to access all forms of required data, analyze the data, and use the analysis to make informed business decisions in a “just-in-time” manner will be considered one of the most impactful technical advancements driving business growth.

Businesses make decisions every day that affect the operations of their business and ultimately contribute to the success or failure of their business. Companies that effectively use data to make informed business decisions are outperforming companies who have not figured out how to use their data.

The following table is derived from two Aberdeen Group reports (“The Analytical Masses – Building Self Service Insight for Line-of-Business Decision Makers”, July 2011 and “Data Management for BI – Big Data, Bigger Insight, Superior Performance”, January 2012):

In my opinion, the above table shows a strong correlation between the ability to access and analyze required data and make timely business decisions to positively impact the growth of a company.

The problem of data and data analysis will grow throughout the decade. Today we are already seeing data volumes grow in size as well as complexity. According to 2011 research by the Aberdeen Group, organizations saw an average increase in data volume of 38% over the previous 12 months. In my opinion, the growth of data volume and complexity will not stop. Capturing, storing and managing data will continue to be an issue. How to effectively use data to gain insight to make better and quicker business decisions will become an even bigger issue that will become more important to solve. This means that businesses will realize that they must get a handle on their “big data” issues and will demand solutions to address these issues.

As these demands grow, solutions will emerge, and more and more companies will be able to make more informed business decisions and drive business growth.

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

The various forces that are transforming the IT landscape are providing useful information to make business decisions, moving IT infrastructures to the cloud, and the effects of a more mobile workforce. As companies realize that they must address these forces, they will realize that not only will business processes need to change, but the role of IT must also change.

In my response above, I identified how solving the “big data” issue will be considered the most technical advance driving business growth in this decade. In solving this issue, the IT department will play a key role. However, their role will not be as the provider of the data and reports, but as the provider of a robust information infrastructure that provides access to many forms of data wherever they reside (for example, data on employee devices including mobile devices, data in the cloud, or data from public sources). And, the IT department must provide the right tools for the business decision makers to analyze and manipulate the data to make business decisions.

This requires the IT department to collaborate with the business decision makers to understand what data they need and how they use the data for decision making. Then the IT department must become experts at finding and integrating data into their information infrastructure, identifying analytical tools to use on the data, and educating the business decision makers as to how to most effectively use the data and tools to gain more meaningful business insight. In other words, the IT department will enable the business decision makers to be much more informed as they make decisions.

Moving the IT infrastructure to the cloud implies that the IT department will no longer be responsible for supporting the IT infrastructure (except for those parts of the infrastructure that are locally based such as desktops, laptops, etc). This will allow the IT department to focus more on being a strategic partner of the company’s business leaders. The IT department’s role will be to ensure that appropriate technologies are being effectively used to further the growth and profitability of the company. This means that the IT department must anticipate the evolution of technology in order to plan ahead for the use of new technologies in the company.

One key set of technologies that the IT department must ensure is being properly used are mobile technologies. Today, enterprises are under constant pressure to integrate the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets into the IT environment. Years ago when the workforce went mobile with laptops and notebooks, the problem was much simpler. Most enterprises supplied laptops to their employees and managed those laptops carefully. In today’s environment, employees are buying their own mobile devices and demanding that they can use them for business (usually starting with e-mail access). The IT department must work with the company’s management to ensure policies and procedures are in place to guarantee the security of the company’s information regardless of how the information is accessed.

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.

What factors are driving the mega-vendors to buy “pure-play” SaaS/Cloud vendors?

Prospective software customers are increasingly demanding Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), seeking a “pay as you go” subscription model. Prospects want a cost model based on utilization instead of ownership with the advantages of no capital expenditures, faster implementations, elimination of long-term contract lock-in, predictable costs, improved system uptime and increased ROI. Increasingly, prospects are refusing to purchase software from vendors who only provide on-premise solutions.

Mega-vendors are buying “pure-play” SaaS/Cloud vendors for three key reasons. First, they don’t want to miss out on the rising client demand as they struggle to transition their on-premise applications to SaaS. Second, they have discovered that their attempts to deliver their on-premise applications with an inefficient multi-instance SaaS architecture lack manageability, scalability and cost effectiveness. Third, they have discovered the high value of highly efficient SaaS architectures based on multi-tenancy.

However, purchasing “pure-play” SaaS companies to capture market demand is a short sighted view. Although incremental revenue may be generated, the significant challenge of moving legacy on-premise applications to SaaS still exists. However, it’s inconceivable to think about scraping the entire legacy portfolio of applications and re-writing them for SaaS.

In some cases, a mega-vendor purchases a “pure-play” company because they have encountered many obstacles and have learned valuable lessons from the pains involved in delivering their on-premise solution as a multi-instance SaaS solution. They have discovered that there are scalability, manageability and operational issues, such as the complexity and difficulty of constant updating of hundreds or thousands of copies of application code. Phil Wainwright, a veteran SaaS evangelist, describes this type of SaaS deployment as “SoSaaS”, for “Same Old Software-as-a-Service!” While this approach gives each client (tenant) web-based access to their application via the cloud, the software vendor does not gain the efficiency of only having one centralized code base to maintain. Nor does it provide the efficiencies of utilizing a single software stack that exists in a true “multi-tenat” SaaS play. This highly inefficient SoSaaS play ultimately slows down the speed of innovation.

In other cases, a mega-vendor purchases a “pure-play” vendor for strategic reasons as in the case of SAP’s purchase of Success Factors. The incremental SAP revenue from the purchase is now only a drop in the bucket. For the longer term, they are looking at the upside potential in the future explosive growth of SaaS. In addition, they also hope Success Factors will be able to infuse the service oriented culture that is needed for a successful SaaS company. Most importantly, SAP hopes they will be able to leverage the key underlying technology element that made Success Factors successful, i.e., their core multi-tenant architecture.

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?

It’s important to remember what Software-as-a-Service is, with a major emphasis on service. Beyond software maintenance contracts, traditional on-premise software companies have little experience in providing operational client service. The challenge for these software companies will be to utilize SaaS as more than a technology. In order for a mega-vendor to be successful with their acquisition, they will need to understand that delivering SaaS requires a cultural and business model change at all levels in the organization from Engineering to Sales.

First, the acquiring company will need to become a student of the “pure-play” SaaS company while driving the changes from the top. Second, they will have to accept taking a short term hit while transitioning from a “pay up front” to a “pay as you go” revenue model. Lastly, they will need to figure out how to effectively leverage the multi-tenant SaaS architecture across their entire product line for long term and sustainable 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.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

The movement of previously enterprise only technologies and business tools, such as analytics, to the cloud are game changers for mid-market and smaller sized businesses. The reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) provided by cloud solutions enable smaller organizations to compete on another scale if they take advantage of the SaaS applications to create more intelligent organizations. They now have the ability to analyze their data; host their data and services; create better customer experiences and have mobile access to not only their own, but partner, customer and market data to make informed, smart and effective decisions quickly. SaaS is about democratizing enterprise applications creating a new playing field for business to compete. If your company is not leveraging SaaS Analytics in the next 5 years you won’t be a leader in your vertical and most likely not be in business. IBM is investing over 7 Billion in Analytics over the next 5-7 years to support customers’ needs to become more predictive around buying trends, selling trends and market indicators. Ultimately moving the information downstream to the individual employee who can be empowered to make informed and timely decisions with reliable, intelligent analysis.

Given that the economic outlook in many parts of the world seems uncertain:
What’s your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?

CloudTrigger has invested heavily in R&D since its inception, creating the G2 Product line of innovative, cloud based analytics solutions that includes G2 Maps and G2 Analytics. We partner with only best in class companies that also focus on innovation, such as ESRI, IBM and Salesforce.com. CloudTrigger is focused on creating innovative solutions that compliment SaaS based solutions with the goal to enable every employee to have access to powerful, mobile tools that help them be more successful at what they do each day.

How do you encourage and foster a growth mindset with your employees and partners?

We work with our customers as trusted advisors in the Cloud Space helping them achieve change management throughout their organization by adopting new cloud technologies. This valuable insight helps our employees and partners stay in alignment with the needs of our customers to drive successful solutions to the market place. CloudTrigger and our partners see the gaps in current solutions and we think creatively and strategically about how to fill these gaps on a larger scale, evidenced by our products G2 Maps and G2 Analytics. Lastly, we encourage everyone in the company to bring their product ideas and suggestions forward and have weekly open forums to discuss product ideas and the company’s priorities.

What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?

CloudTrigger is a solution company whose success is built on our customers’ success; our ability to listen combined with our deep cloud domain expertise allows us to present our customers with fully integrated solutions. We reward our employees based on the metrics we drive around customer satisfaction and loyalty, incentivizing the right behavior to create a world class customer experience. We don’t stop with our customers as we follow the same principles with our employees. We have a great culture built on treating employees with respect, giving them the support they need to do their jobs well, benefits so they can live well and even all expenses paid “Club” trips for exemplary employees.

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

Absolutely, as mobile becomes more and more ubiquitous for consumer applications it drives the point home on how critical it is to have strong mobile applications to help run your business every day as well. Insight and access to your business data will be critical in the future as we will be expected to respond quickly to the daily demands of our jobs regardless of where we are physically. Companies need to adopt mobile solutions that extend the capability of their business applications to their employees providing them with the tools to be effective in the market place. More and more companies, including CloudTrigger, have employees located remotely all over the world or in the field for the majority of their job. The model of the worker at his/her desk at company headquarters for 8 hours a day is something of the past. People work from all over, across time zones and continents; therefore not only do we build custom mobile solutions for our customers, it is also part of all of our product road maps to incorporate mobile solutions.

As an example when we launched G2 Maps we worked in parallel to create a companion native iPad app and the road map includes additional mobile platforms like Android in 2012. G2 Analytics will launch officially in May and we have incorporated a powerful mobile platform for access to your analytics reports and dashboards on any mobile device, which easily moves the back office domain knowledge to the fingertips of all employees whether they are at HQ or in the field. This also allows C-Level execs access to mission critical data about their business anytime and anywhere. Helping them make better, more informed decisions to drive profitability and growth. Both solutions, G2Maps and G2Analytics provide powerful advantages for increasing your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness that is not offered anywhere else.

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