Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Pavlovsky, Product General Manager, Control and Communications Systems Business, GE Intelligent Platforms (Part 1)

There’s more to General Electric (GE) than people might think. Founded in 1890 by Thomas Edison, the company has moved beyond providing electricity and light bulbs. As my conversation with Steve Pavlovsky will reveal, GE continues to move forward and adapt with changing times in ways that Edison would likely approve of.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Steve. Let’s start with your personal background and the organization within GE, GE Intelligent Platforms, that you’re part of. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 4)

Because Elizabeth had some exciting news to share with me during the course of our interview together regarding a recent acquisition that Citrix made, I decided to forgo my usual questions and focus instead on the company that was acquired and why Citrix thought it would be a good fit.

Sramana Mitra: Elizabeth, what have you acquired? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I agree with you. Service Now is an excellent company.

Elizabeth Cholawsky: Yes. We’re coming from the position of remote support as the core competency and building a constellation of IT tools around that. We come at it from two different use cases and two different parts of the tools. Service Now is interesting to us. Our remote support competitor Bomgar is doing interesting things, but it’s pure premise, and one of the trends that’s driving Citrix’s business right now is just all of cloud computing. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The part of the market I was referring to as the broader support market includes products like Assistly, for instance, which is inside of Salesforce.com, Zendesk, and a variety of startups and other companies that have come up with products in that space. Those are not what you compete with? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 1)

We’ve featured Citrix on the blog before. This time, we’re going to discuss the wonderful things that Citrix is doing in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Elizabeth. Let’s start with a bit of your personal background as well as what Citrix is doing in the area of cloud-based support.

Elizabeth Cholawsky: Right now I am the general manager for the IT support line of business at Citrix, which includes all of the GoToAssist branded products. I took this position a couple of years ago, but when I first joined Citrix, I was the VP of product management and client services. Client services runs through my career for the past 20 plus years. When we decided to focus on IT support, it was a natural segue from running our contact center operations and support operations to managing the business for these products. >>>

Concur Executing Steadily in Fast-Growing SaaS Market

Gartner estimates that the worldwide SaaS market was worth $12.3 billion last year and projects it will grow to $14.5 billion this year. Further, IDC estimates that worldwide SaaS market revenue will grow at an annual rate of 26% over the next few years to reach $53.6 billion by 2015. IDC also projects that by 2015, SaaS will account for 73% of public cloud services revenue. Existing SaaS vendors such as Concur are gearing up for this growth.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Toplisek, EVP, Product and Marketing, EarthLink (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, it’s a technology-enabled solution. It’s not a people-empowered service; it’s software as a service.

Mike Toplisek: That’s right. It’s about empowerment. We’re driving more toward that. We have a business with an existing cost structure that enables us to provide human touch as needed. We’ll service our customers in the way that they want to be serviced, but more and more, the way they want to be serviced is by being empowered to make the changes without having to deal with a human touch. That is where most of our investment and research & development are going, into that MyLink control panel. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Toplisek, EVP, Product and Marketing, EarthLink (Part 3)

SM: This is an interesting discussion. When people read this interview, can they gauge how to determine whether or not they would be a fit for you?

MT: Yes. It’s very broad. We play in multiple verticals. So, what we’re doing is alignment of value-add applications and bundling that with other necessary tools like collaboration services and traditional voice and Internet access services, professional services, IT support, security. If it’s a startup with something unique for the health care industry … maybe it does something to help with HIPAA compliance or customer billing for health care, which can be complex, we can bundle that with a lot of other services that are relevant for a regional hospital, for example. >>>