Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Well, you know, the application suite that is seeing the maximum migration is actually Lotus Notes.

Ken Stephens: No, it’s amazing. Lotus Live was an amazing success for IBM. That was a bit of a coup on their part to do that. But we shall see.

SM: People are moving out of Lotus, right?

KS: They moved a great deal of users to Lotus Live when they introduced their Lotus Live. But there are a lot of users moving away from Lotus Notes entirely, yes, that’s true.

SM: What is your impression? What are you seeing? What are they moving to? Is your impression that they’re moving to Azure or Google Apps or what?
>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s where I think Salesforce.com has been extremely successful.

Ken Stephens: Yes, but do you think Salesforce.com is going to become a major player at the platform?

SM: Yes, I do. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even within the IT portion, it sounds like I’m hearing infrastructure as a service as the organizing principle.

Ken Stephens: Yes. It’s a staple. You have to do that, and we do that.

SM: What gaps do you see in the market right now? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 2)

SM: It sounds like Xerox is turning into an IT outsourcing company.

KS: We have about $2 billion in revenue today from IT outsourcing already. We’re a $22 billion company, and about $2 billion of it is IT outsourcing. Now, in the market that we’re pursuing, the services business, historically, ACS and Xerox have pursued Fortune 2000, generally speaking. In the cloud space, we’re pursuing the SMB market as well. So, we’re not only pursuing the top 2000 companies in the world. We’re also pursuing companies that have $10 million to $250 million a year in revenue. Those are much smaller companies, as you can imagine. The reality is smaller companies have just as much, if not more, to gain from cloud computing than their larger competitors. So, it’s a very attractive market and one that we’re excited about. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 1)

Xerox, originally known as the M.H. Kuhn Company and then the Haloid Company, has been around for more than 100 years. The first electrophotographic or xerographic copy was made in 1938 by inventor Chester Carlson, who patented the technology in 1942. In 1948, the name “Xerox” was trademarked. Since then, Xerox has permeated our culture to the point where some people, when they want to make a photocopy of something, will simply say, “Xerox it.” Xerox has changed a lot in 100 years, as my conversation with Ken Stephens will reveal.   >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Garrou, VP of Global Solutions Management, Savvis (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: As far as your own infrastructure is concerned, you’re heavily into this hosting and colocation business. What is going on on the side of the hardware vendors or the infrastructure vendors, so to speak, that you buy from? What are they providing for you? Is this a topic that you can discuss at all?

Steve Garrou: I can discuss the commercial models we have with our hardware partners. Technical specs, not so much. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Garrou, VP of Global Solutions Management, Savvis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. That still doesn’t solve the issue of these rogue applications being brought into the enterprise. Is there anything on your radar that’s trying to address that issue?

Steve Garrou: Of rogue applications being used within the enterprise?

SM: Yes. For example, there are thousands of SaaS applications today. Say somebody decides, OK, I’m going to use a social media analytics tool from XYZ, a little company that has not been validated by purchasing or anything. I just want to use it. The dangerous thing is right now, there is a lot of data that flows through these applications that could be critical data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Garrou, VP of Global Solutions Management, Savvis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you were an entrepreneur designing a solution, how would design it?

Steve Garrou: I definitely want to pick up on your point on Salesforce and the like. I think you’re right. The groundswell, and the quickest route to market, is definitely focusing on the business unit or a specific problem within a company and solving that problem. That is the quickest way. I wonder if an entrepreneur isn’t wildly successful like Salesforce.com is, it may be difficult to scale. There are opportunities to bridge the gap; if there’s a way to bridge the gap between the IT organization and the line of business with a solution, I would focus there. I think IT organizations are ripe for that type of solution, whether it’s on the software side, on the infrastructure side, or the data side. I think they’re looking for ways to be proactive and meet those needs. But finding an application or service that meets the line of business need and at the same time be able to link it back into the corporate mothership is an ideal place to focus. >>>