Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.

Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. >>>

Q2 Holdings Helping Financial Institutions Move to the Cloud

According to IT Spending in Banking: A North American Perspective, a report published by Celent, US financial institutions were expected to spend nearly $48.9 billion on IT initiatives in 2013. The study found that of this spend, $11.4 billion would be incurred on new initiatives. Banks are increasing their presence online and the new initiative spend is going toward improving their capabilities for online, mobile, tablet, and other self-service capabilities.

>>>

Globoforce Delays Their IPO Plans

According to a Gartner research report, an organization spends nearly 2% of its payroll cost on traditional employee recognition expenses. A study conducted by IDC in 2012 estimated that the North America employee recognition market will grow 8% annually over the period 2011 through 2016. The market was worth $22 billion in 2011 and was projected to reach $32 billion in 2016.

>>>

Paylocity Addressing the Growing HCM Market

According to an IDC research report, the US market for Human Capital Management (HCM) applications and payroll outsourcing services is expected to be worth $22.5 billion this year. Another research report by Aberdeen Group published in 2012 estimated that nearly 38% of HCM related investment was being made in cloud computing initiatives. It is not just the big organizations that are wanting to deploy cloud based offerings, but the smaller organizations are also realizing the benefits of a cloud-based HCM offering.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let me suggest something else as well. You know there’re so many cloud apps right now. It’s becoming very fragmented and there is a large number of point solutions all over the place. With an enterprise company with lots of resources, you can potentially avail of integration resources to manage all these and to coordinate and link things up. There is also a huge amount of cloud services and applications consumption in the small business category. There, the resources just do not exist to be able to stitch all these things up and to integrate. What is your view of that world?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 6)

Mark Mader: Then, there was the promise in native app development that went, “Why don’t you build it with a framework and the framework can propagate your app to all these different device platforms?” That failed miserably. The performance did not meet client’s expectations for almost every provider who tried that. Ten people said, “What’s the promise of HTML 5?” That also failed. User experience level was not high enough. We’ve gone from a web app world to where people’s expectations on solutions being, “I want a compelling web experience plus I want a compelling native app experience so that I can access, update, and share my information from wherever I am.”

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Given that’s your sweet spot, whom do you consider as your direct competitor?

Mark Mader: By far in a way, the largest direct competitor remains the traditional spreadsheet. There’s not any other SaaS provider today that uses our form factor – the spreadsheet grid that we present in a collaborative way. When you look at the other markets right now – whether it’s email automation, surveying, CRM, or file sync and share – most of them have multiple participants. Look at Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, you could just go on and on about all the competitors in those specific niche categories. I think what happened in our category was people conceded the market to Google and Microsoft. When in fact, there was a huge opportunity to innovate on something that is 20 years old in concept. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In that strategy, were you actually partnering with Salesforce and going to market through the AppExchange?

Brad Peters: We were. Salesforce is a fairly hands-off partner. I wouldn’t say that it was a huge help. That has generally been my experience talking to other people. You find Salesforce customers on your own and tell the story to them directly. AppExchange was a nice technical integration point. It wasn’t that great a marketing tool.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard big feedback on that. Some people have been very successful generating leads out of AppExchange and some have not. It sounds like in your case, it has not.

>>>