After 16 years with working for a 350,000 employee global company (IBM), I recently made a move to a 16 employee local based IT provider (Cima Solutions Group). The day before I started, I was given two URLs and told – these are the applications you will be using at Cima, you shouldn’t need any training, but if you do, the tutorials are helpful. My first thought was, “what have you gotten yourself into?”. However, after logging into the apps, I quickly began to realize that the sky was not falling, just the clouds.

Having familiarity only with PROFS (if you are under 35, ask an elder), Lotus Notes and Siebel, I logged into Google Apps and Salesforce.com for the first time and began to work effectively on day one. What quickly hit me was, the basics of these two applications (email/calendar and CRM) have commoditized. However, what as grown up around these two applications is what sets them apart. For Google, the document management and collaboration features are a dramatic improvement in their ability to allow users to collaborate. For Salesforce, it is the ease of creating robust analytics (reports/dashboards). What I once thought of as add on highly customized functions, now become end user driven tools. Which brings me to my big question, why isn’t every company thinking about this?

In my interactions with Clients, Prospects and Partners, I often share the experience above in order to get honest reaction. Some common opinions continue to prevail:

1) We could never do that in a large company…The truth is, Google and Salesforce, have a long list of 3,000 user plus clients. Far more than I would have expected. They are not positioning this solution as merely for the small business.

2) We have too much sensitive data…The truth is, companies that provide cloud based solutions are held to higher security standards. They currently have Federal, and State government agencies as their clients. They have a team of highly specialized resources focused on insuring the highest level of security. While most companies have just appointed a security officer in the last 12 months and have never paid for even a penetration test.

3) The TCO of a cloud based offering seems too good to be true…The truth is, the economy of scale allows for a much improved TCO when looking to the could for these solutions. For example, Google offers a $50/user/year charge. This includes the full suite of apps – email, calendar, sites, docs (spreadsheet, word, presentation etc), full virus protection and anti-spamming Postinini as well as several bolt on integrated apps. Even better, this includes 25GB of storage per user, and no need to buy servers. 25GB! – what is the cap on your inbox today before you have to mess with archiving to desktop? I will worry about this in 2020 at current pace.

What I have described above are just two examples of what the industry is calling Software as a Service (SAAS). Today, there is a place for this in every company, big or small, new or old. At one point companies owned their facilities and managed them with their own employees. Seems almost prehistoric now. Various non-core workloads continue to go this route, even in IT. Current customer satisfaction ratings with the common SAAS based offerings are at 90%! So, if you haven’t already, get your head in cloud!

Todd Brown – VP of New Business and Cloud development