Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you are trying to transmit data from those devices into a centralized cloud environment for debugging, technical support, or customer service?

Joel Young: Yes.  It even extends to consumption and auditing purposes.

SM: Are those devices then spitting out information that you are putting into the Salesforce.com cloud?

JY: The devices tend to spit out a lot of information.  We store that in long-term storage within the iDigi device cloud. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How is cloud computing affecting your business? Which are the major trends you are tracking?

Joel Young: As I mentioned, we provide iDigi, a device cloud which connects devices to the broader Internet. Anybody who wishes to get information can access the device through standard HTTP web services into the cloud. We store all device information through long-term storage in the cloud, and we provide vehicles for controlling devices in the cloud. This is a critical component of what we do and how we extend our product and connectivity to the world. Salesforce.com are a good partner for us. This has blossomed over the past six months, as we find that the Internet of things marketplace is more and more about cloud connectivity. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 1)

Joel Young is the senior vice president of research & development and chief technical officer of Digi International, a machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions expert for improving business efficiencies. In this interview Joel talks about the integration of the company’s systems in businesses like Salesforce.com and future trends of “the Internet of Things.” According to Wikipedia, the Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects (things) and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure.

Sramana Mitra: Joel, let’s start with context about Digi and also context about your background.

Joel Young: First of all, you probably haven’t thought of Digi as in cloud computing. We have been in business since 1985, and we were always in the device connectivity business. We make things that connect devices – originally, to servers or computers. As the world has evolved, we have evolved with it, so we started putting devices on networks. Our goal, since we were founded, has been to connect devices into an application. The world has evolved from serial ports to networks like Ethernet and local area networks (LANs). >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you have a lot of e-commerce customers, does that mean you are building in the capabilities of running a full e-commerce shopping cart, for example, into your portfolio?

Joe Langner: With the number of customers we have and the time we have been on the market, we either produce those capabilities ourselves from our core products, or we work with business partners who complement some of those additional features.  Shopping carts, web stores, e-buildings, or digital signatures are using technology to automate processes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where does BlackBerry fit into all of this?  This is a segment that has high BlackBerry adoption.

Joe Langner: The devices we are writing to are those two [Android and iOS] at this point.  I haven’t seen the BlackBerry adoption as much.  They lost a lot of mind share in the marketplace. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The bottom line is that you provide mobile app content to the entire ERP suite.

Joe Langner: Yes. The change within our business is that we change the apps once, but then they work with the multiple solutions we have. The customers don’t have to change their whole backup by turning off their systems; they can just add this if they have the need to extend the use of the tool. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your customers consists of IT or IT-enabled businesses?

Joe Langner: Depending on what you define as IT or IT enabled, across all of Sage mid-market customers, 16% to 19% fall into that category.

SM: What are we seeing in this segment as far as needs and behaviors? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At the level you are talking about, the competitor is no longer QuickBooks, it is Intacct and Netsuite.

Joe Langner: When you look purely at the enterprise resource planning (ERP) of Netsuite and Intacct, you can say that there can be friction. We do want to have the best ERP and the best accounting package that people can buy, but we also want to address a lot of the friction that has occurred. We are doing that through leveraging the web.  If we have a CRM or a front-end system and we also have the ERP system, we can address some of those challenges that the others have because we own both the front-end and the back-end, and we have the ability to make the systems work together more seamlessly. If you think about the social media space, you have Facebook, and the Facebook ID is used a lot with other applications. >>>