Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 1)

Did you know that the core technology at the heart of apps like Uber and Lyft is a relatively lesser known cloud-based communication platform called Twilio? Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Twilio to begin with.

Jeff Lawson: I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Twilio. Twilio is communication-as-a-service. What we do is we allow companies to use our communication infrastructure running in the cloud to build and innovate applications that they need to communicate. Customers span companies from the Fortune 500 to innovative startups like Airbnb and Uber. They use Twilio’s communication capabilities to fundamentally create a better customer experience that closes the loop in some kind of application that needs to talk to human beings. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If I got this right, you were drawn into this Remedy projects and as you were working on these, you saw the opportunity to build framework around the various Remedy problems that you were seeing and be able to productize what you were doing as projects essentially.

John Sundberg: I see it a little bit differently. I saw a business problem that people had and the common tool was Remedy. Therefore, I used the Remedy tool to solve these common business problems. You described it as Remedy problems. I describe them as business problems. Remedy was just the tool that usually got me invited to the party, so to speak.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you look around from your vantage point, what’s happening? What are the trends that you are picking up or trends that you’re anticipating right now?

Scott McIsaac: In today’s world, we see a lot of business being pushed in the direction of the cloud. Businesses are realizing that they can focus on what they do best versus having to deal with a lot of infrastructure. Again to Sean’s point earlier, if they have compliance needs, they’re still looking to the cloud, but they’re looking for a provider that can provide that level of service.

>>>

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.

>>>