Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 9)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: Yes, you can’t have a baby crying at the top of its voice and be able to maintain a professional environment where you need to maybe be on phone and such. There are some issues.

Frank: Right, and not everybody is in the situation where they have created that personal space. I think we are in a transition, because I don’t think it is as simple as you might think. There is a great deal of stigma that also come over time. For example, I have a telepresence unit at home. I did a telepresence meeting with one of our clients. The client was in Europe. I was in North America. The call was at 4:00 a.m. in Chicago, and it was something like 11 or 12 in Europe. You have an interesting dilemma. They know you are in Chicago, but it is a formal business meeting. Do you put on a suit? Does a suit at 4:00 a.m. look weird? I don’t know. I put on a suit. They were amazed with the technologies a couple of years ago, but you get into this kind of funny question of, well, how should I show up? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Whenever we see discontinuities in terms of technology in our industry, this opens up opportunities for entrepreneurship. It opens up what’s happening at the cusp. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on blue-sky opportunities that you see that playing to this trend of behavior at home merging with behavior at work and people’s expectations influencing what things should be like at work. What do you consider to be open problems? What kinds of applications would you want to see that you don’t see today? >>>

Customer Service And The Social Web

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade. In it, I suggested that the way various business functions are done will change owing to the impact of the social Web, crowdsourcing, and so on. The areas that are seeing the most upheaval are customer services, which spans customer support, technical support, and related services. Below are observations from two 1M/1M entrepreneurs working in this area.

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: And turn it all into products?

Frank: Well, not so much turn it into anything in particular. I have a feeling that there is a lot of stuff that is either very old and not in sync with business, or of very limited use, and there is a real opportunity to take out a lot of old capabilities that are underutilized, but this hasn’t been dealt with. For example, when we migrated to [Lotus] Notes, when we did that back in like 2004, 2005, we had 30 some-odd thousand Notes databases. As we went through them, we found out a lot of them are underutilized or not used at all. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: Let me ask you a question on that, although from a slightly different perspective. I recently had a conversation, last week actually with the CIO of Intel, Diane Bryant.

Frank: Yes, I know Diane.

Sramana: She talked about platform as a service at length. Intel is running its own platform as a service solution in-house. Of course, she doesn’t like to do this. This is not something she is happy about. But her reasoning was that she would not like to be locked into one of the PaaS vendors, whether it is Salesforce.com or Google Apps or Microsoft Azure. So, I would like to get your perspective on what do you see as the platform as service evolution? Where is it going, what are the trends, and how do you see this market shaping up? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: This question of broadband is obviously an open question. I think it remains to be seen how that will play out. Where else do you see in the broad space of collaboration – we have touched on it from different perspectives – where do you see opportunities for entrepreneurship? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: I think part of it is that, the idea that people have to be dressed for a call is a bit of a barrier to entry, but there is also something else. When you look at these video conferencing systems, they are not trivial. They are widely available now, but they are not entirely trivial. If you have many parties on different types of configurations, the video conferencing system often hiccups. And this may not be true for you because you have a highly controlled corporate environment, but if you look outside the corporate environment or the enterprise environment, it is not quite as seamless. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: What about the higher-end cutting edge collaboration functionalities? Let me go to the absolute other extreme, desktop tele-presence. How far are we from desktop tele-presence in the cloud?

Frank: I don’t think we are that far, because a lot of the pieces are falling into place. Right now, I am talking to you from my laptop at a third-party training facility that owns a Wi-Fi connection. If you are on the same technology we use, we could be doing this call in a video session on the desktop. We have about 25,000 video enabled m-points as webcams. So, we are already doing desktop video across the company. We have tele-presence at the high end. I think you are going to start seeing the cost point on the cameras dropping. When that happens, I think you are going to see a lot of the webcams move to high definition, and that experience will be similar to the quality of the experience you get with tele-presence. >>>