It started with the clouds at Googleplex in Mountain View and ended with the clouds and fog that roll in over Giants Stadium in San Francisco.
I was invited to present at and participate in an invigorating day organized by appirio last week with a number of cloud computing pioneers. Google, amazon, salesforce.com and appirio shared their experiences with several CIOs from a variety of industries and locations.
The breaks during the day and the game gave me the opportunity to walk-about and talk to pioneering CIOs like Doug Menefee of the healthcare firm, Schumacher Group. He has already implemented SaaS from salesforce.com, Workday, Eloqua and Apttus and vertical functionality via Tangier.
The day started in the hustle and bustle of the Google campus with its vision for enterprise apps in the cloud covering Gmail, Docs and in-cloud development using App Engine. Most interesting was the growing list of 10,000+ user organizations which have implemented(with appirio as the implementation partner) at least some portion of Google Apps. It also included an entertaining session with Google’s CIO Ben Fried who contrasted his new job (he’s been there a year) to that at Morgan Stanley – including the statement he felt he had reversed the typical corporate IT spend of 80% towards “keep the lights on” versus innovation.
Adam Gross of salesforce.com did a nice job summarizing how various architectural elements of SaaS and cloud computing have evolved over the last decade. In a side conversation I asked him what was he considered the biggest surprise as he has seen the market evolve : the industry is still debating multi-tenancy!
Daniel Patton of amazon provided glimpses into core competencies on what allows them to price cloud compute and storage so cheaply (including funny episodes on how frugal amazon is “I was hired to build a sales team, then asked to justify why I needed to recruit every person I tried to hire”). In a side conversation he said amazon is just discovering how many Fortune 500 companies are already its customers – existing relationships are with individuals using their credit cards.
Troy Angrignon of appirio shared the on-going results of a “ecosystem map” he has been building which catalogs hundreds of emerging SaaS and cloud providers. You need a microscope to drill into the variety of emerging choices – a testament to the huge amount of innovation beyond the major vendors represented in that room.
I presented on 20 areas of fat in corporate IT and on next-gen cloud efficiencies. From a quick show of hands, Anne Meskell, VP of IT at Thomson Reuters won - She said she had tackled between 5 and 10 of those areas. That puts an exclamation point on the amount of fat still to be removed from current IT via clouds.
What’s next? Varies from CIO to CIO. Given Doug Menefee’s experiences with 5 SaaS packages , he believes we are way past talking about the cloud in “pioneering” terms – and in fact should be talking about “proven solutions”. Also, he wants more on a focus on better and better priced bandwidth. “Next generation cloud services need to be positioned to deliver mega-amounts of data and we need the pipes to be be able to accommodate them.”
There is a slightly different agenda for Joe Trifoglio of Zip Realty who shared early teething issues he had with SaaS - but given the state of the real estate industry he continues to look for significant efficiencies from the cloud.
And a different perspective from Russ Nelson of salesforce.com who gets to “eat his own dog food”.
Thankfully, we ate from a much more edible buffet at the game as Russ and I discussed Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s among other topics. appriro had rented the McCovey Cove Loft at the stadium – a really nice place where a group of up to 50 can mingle and discuss SLAs and baseball stats.
To top the day, the Giants won. They beat the Phillies, which as a Rays fan having lost the World Series to them, suited me just fine :)
