Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Singh, CEO of Concur (Part 5)

SM: Interesting vision. Besides these kinds of convergences that you’re predicting, the mobile phone, the wallet and the security key, where else do you point young entrepreneurs or early stage entrepreneurs to look for opportunities?

SS: I think the other thing that’s critical is to say, hey, what business problems can I solve, on a mobile device, in a cloud computing model that were too expensive to solve prior to that? For example, just to give you a quick reference point on that, go back to a client server or Web server-based applications. You couldn’t cost-effectively deliver even expense management to a wide range of companies in a client server model. It’s just too expensive to deploy it, customize it and roll it out to all the different users within a company. You move to cloud computing and that becomes imminently cost effective and easy to deploy.  So, processes like travel booking and expense reporting weren’t even possible until you got to cloud computing. That same analogy has to be considered when you go to mobile computing. What are the things that you’d be able to automate or make easier that today are largely manual? What processes are made easier and cheaper because of mobile computing and cloud-based computing? There are literally thousands of examples around this. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Singh, CEO of Concur (Part 4)

SM: The example that I was giving you earlier along the same lines has exactly the same argument because these corporate rewards and recognition merchandise vendors find an efficient channel to sell through, and with repeat purchase patterns and that’s very attractive to them.

SS: That’s exactly right.

SM: What do you see in terms of gaps and opportunities for early stage entrepreneurs to look at, based on all the things that we have discussed?   >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Singh, CEO of Concur (Part 3)

SM: Right. Where you are sitting, the specific value proposition that you deliver, just by virtue of doing that for many years now for your clients, you have already accumulated a lot of this data. My question was do you have the technologies to be able to analyze that data and draw these personalization inferences.

SS: We do. Where I was going is you will see that actually being integrated deeply into our products. For example, all of our data sets are in Hadoop now. So, we’re able to use this information not just for the purposes of being able to analyze trends but then also feeding it back into the application set. For example, when you log on and say, “hey, I’d like to book a hotel,” the reality is that as you use our product, you always had the option to say, “give me more choices,” but when you use our product, the hotel choices that you get will be constrained by two variables. One is what is your corporate policy? And two is what are your preferences within that? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Singh, CEO of Concur (Part 2)

SM: A personalized commerce opportunity, yes.

SS: Completely personalized. It’s personalized down to the individual level. It’s not a company level. It’s down to the individual person. It says I know about you. I know how to meet your needs, and I know how to make your trip a better experience. So, what we see happening is we see all these applications companies, and they will take all this rich data and deliver it back to the customer and to the end user and to the supplier in a way that makes it a more efficient supply chain for the supplier and frankly, a better experience for the traveler. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Steve Singh, CEO of Concur (Part 1)

Business travel can be a pain, especially when it comes to knowing you can and can’t include on your expense account when you return. Concur is one company that will help you remain compliant with your company’s policies and still enjoy your trip as much as possible. Founded in 1993, Concur is a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions that provides services for more than 15,000 clients and more than 15 million users worldwide.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Steve. We talked some time back, and of course, the cloud industry — when we talked — was still kind of hitting its stride. Now, the momentum is in full force. Give me an overview of what you see around you to kick this off, and then we’ll double click down on major things that you see. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pradeep Rathinam, CEO of Aditi Technologies (Part 7)

SM: Last question, when you look around, what are some of the interesting entrepreneurial opportunities that are opening up because of the wide adoption of platform-as-a-service as it unfolds?

PR: If you’re an entrepreneur today, your startup cost is incrementally low. If you have a good idea, to execute on an idea, you can leverage a public infrastructure of Microsoft Azure or Amazon and build something out in record time, in three months, and ship something out. Three people in a garage can get amazing things done with what I see today with some of the cloud infrastructure that’s out there. So, it’s a question now of what do startups put their energy into? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pradeep Rathinam, CEO of Aditi Technologies (Part 6)

SM: Let me get another piece of clarification here. So, Microsoft is playing this game both at an isolated platform-as-a-service level as well as an integrated platform-as-a-service plus infrastructure-as-a-service, is that correct?

PR: That’s correct.

SM: Whereas Amazon is just playing infrastructure-as-a-service, Rackspace is playing the infrastructure-as-a-service game, Microsoft Azure, I presume, can be lowered on top of any of those infrastructure-as-a-service platforms, yes? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pradeep Rathinam, CEO of Aditi Technologies (Part 5)

SM: Yes. Your point is well taken that there are definitely some gaps in Google’s offering in Google Apps, but there is also a substantial amount of business going to Google, from what I gather, because of the incredible cost structure that they have created.

PR: It’s free, yes, it is free … for the most part.

SM: And there are solutions to the gaps. We have a company in One Million by One Million that actually works with Google Apps to plug some of the gaps of Google Apps to do exactly, you know, plug gaps that come up in the Lotus Notes migration process. >>>