This past week I signed two agreements that will lay the foundation for the next 5 years for Cima.  Both of the agreements will allow us to expand our portfolio of cloud based offerings.  While IT Optimization has been a cornerstone to our business, the reality is we haven’t fully exploited optimization with our clients given that the maturity we strive for in delivering cloud based offerings wasn’t there.  With the agreements, we now have the ability to:

• provide a comprehensive collaboration platform using Google Apps
• deploy those applications with Cima led skills
• provide an infrastructure to support computing for our clients outside of their datacenter.

Moving to this has been an evolution for Cima.  When I first started the company 5 years ago, our focus was to deliver IT Infrastructure solutions to our clients by optimizing their internal resources.  Given that I was starting the company from the ground up, I evaluated how I would deliver computing resources for our own internal usage.  It was obvious to me at that time that having our consultants managing our internal resources was not a good use of our consulting resources.  For our email environment, I went with a hosted exchange environment.  For our CRM solution, it was Salesforce.com.   For accounting, I opted for Quickbooks.  Given the maturity of the online version, I stuck with the traditional route of QB on a desktop computer.  We extended our file sharing enviornment through our implementation of salesforce.com and as for printer sharing, we went with a network printer from HP – nothing sophisticated.

5 years later, we’ve made some modifications to the environment but the idea of an “infrastructureless” company still holds true.  Our growth and business model required us to re-evaluate our accounting package which required more computing resources in house.  I tried that out for a couple of years and and am in the process of moving those resources out of our location and in to our MSP platform (that’s one of the agreements I signed).   The first hosted Exchange environment was not stable enough for us so I transferred to another Hosted Exchange environment.  After 5 straight months with down time, I decided to go with Google Apps.  Zero downtime and 2 years later we’re delighted with that selection.  Interestingly, our use of all of the Google apps (docs, spreadhsheet, etc.) has been a huge productivity booster for our company.  As for Salesforce, our implementation grew with our needs and continues to be what holds the “story” of our company.

Using ourselves as a case study, I don’t understand how any small to mid-size company hasn’t fully embraced this model.   Armed with our success and the financial logic that hits you over the head when you see it laid out, we’ve decided to go full bore in to the positioning of “infrastructureless” computing with our clients.  Not every project requires the same tool – in other words our infrastructure based offerings will continue to be the most significant part of our business.    I’m very excited to see what the next 5 years holds for Cima, I’m certain our forecast will be sunny and cloudy (yeah, I just said that).