Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 1)

You have heard me discuss bootstrapping using services quite a lot. Here, we also take on another important key strategy for customer acquisition: content marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised and in what kind of circumstances?

John Sundberg: I’m currently in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where our office is. I was born in Minneapolis. I’ve been in Minnesota all of my life. My wife is from Connecticut. My upbringing was very open-minded. My dad taught positive attitude and sales training and indirectly, I’ve had that positive attitude all my life. He ran his own company. It was a small company. As a result of watching that while growing up, I thought I wanted to work in a big company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 4)

Scott McIsaac: It comes down to having that experience and application knowledge. We don’t get into the functional support of the application. For example with SAP, the business process side is still handled by the customers. They handle all the workflows within the system and all the intricacies there. We typically manage the bases level, which is making sure that the database is running, that we understand that the job are optimized, and that the systems are performing.

That specialization is about understanding the infrastructure layer of it. A lot of it is database. In today’s world, it is about how the database works in virtualization and what virtualization technology we are using. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For IBM, a $500 million to $2 billion is probably not as interesting as a client. For you, it is interesting.

Sean Donaldson: We’ve had some opportunities winning some very large clients from them. In one case, a customer was with IBM and after six months of trying to get a particular system set up, they came to us and said that they had to have it up by the end of the year. We had about 30 systems up for them before the end of the year and they could close the books. With IBM, it took them literally six months and they hadn’t got that far.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Give me a sense of the competitive landscape. We know this market reasonably well. If you could help us understand who are your direct competitors are, that would be great.

Sean Donaldson: There’re a lot of companies who do SAP really well. There’re also others who do Oracle really well. We’re probably the only business under the billion dollar large IBM-type organization that has this breadth of application expertise. That’s where we really differentiate ourselves. We have the flexibility and the nimbleness of a smaller organization but the capability of an IBM or Xerox.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 1)

Today, we’ll look at private cloud hosting as a domain to double-click on. Scott and Sean, with Secure-24, are competing with the likes of IBM.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome to Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing. If you would first introduce yourself as well as the company to give us some context, that’ll be great.

Sean Donaldson: I’m Co-CTO at Secure-24 with Scott McIsaac. I have 15 years of mostly infrastructure experience, effectively building cloud infrastructure and cloud solutions for numerous clients.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 7)

Ulf Zetterberg: It’s almost like a knowledge management system because if these self-service systems are built the correct way, an intelligent user can leverage this as a knowledge platform and perhaps do advance queries. It becomes almost like a dialogue. There’s a big debate in the legal industry about the automated lawyer or the IT lawyer and how much of legal or lawyer can be replaced by machines. But you can probably replace lots of that in day-to-day work to speed that up. You can save the most sophisticated work for the best lawyers.

Sramana Mitra: I was talking to somebody form the manufacturing industry for our Thought Leaders in Big Data Series and this came up as well. A lot of manufacturing functions could become completely machine to machine, completely ruling out the role of the human being from the process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is actually a good segue to my final question. Where do you point entrepreneurs to look for opportunities for building new companies? I think we’ve already started that discussion. If you take the base layer of unstructured data and then on top of that, you look at the different application areas. You were saying to apply another filter to it, which is try to find things that you can sell to business users without having to deal with IT in the process, and focus on application areas that can take advantage of 20% of the high-impact data that is really going to drive the heuristics value. Can you give some concrete examples of business problems where these apply?

>>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mall for Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 1)

E-Commerce is blossoming all over the world. In this story, we take a close look at what is happening in Africa, especially Nigeria.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as Mall For Africa. Tell us about what you do and what’s happening in your world.

Chris Folayan: I’m the Founder and CEO of Mall for Africa. Mall for Africa is an online application both for PC and mobile that allows people in Africa to purchase items from US and UK sites. Most companies currently do not ship directly to any country in Africa, but Africa is a thriving continent and people there want to purchase items from the US and UK. Since many sites in the US and UK don’t do that, we’ve created a platform that, in essence, opens up  true global e-commerce to the people of Africa. >>>