Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Let’s talk about moving to Google Apps or Google e-mail at some point. Right now you work on an Exchange platform. You have developed all your applications on top of the Microsoft environment. Now if you move to Google, all of that investment kind of becomes a rogue situation, right? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Based on my research, I see a distinct trend [toward] interesting private cloud deployment.

LO: Very interesting! What would you say is the driver; I am curious to know.

SM: I think it’s cost that is the driver, which is why I was probing that, to understand what your perspective on private cloud adoption was. To some extent, it has happened in some cases that cost is the driver. Earlier, you mentioned cases that required the kind of data security and clients did not want to co-mingle their data with other data in a multi-tenant multi-cloud environment. Those are some of the drivers for private cloud adoption as well. What surprised me was – and I have heard it from SMEs as well – that there are the large vendors of infrastructure who are pushing private cloud’s stacks to their large customer base. It is they who are trying to build analytics clouds internally. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO Of RightNow (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: How do you handle pricing for a situation such as the private cloud deployment for the Department of Defense (DoD)? Your primary product is on a per user per month subscription model, right? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What is your take on security in the cloud? As part of delivering this enormous infrastructure to your clients, you obviously have to worry about data security. What is the data security strategy that you deploy for your cloud-based infrastructure? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Wilcox, CIO of HMH Publishing (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What percentage of books today are being sold by Amazon and online retailers?

PW: I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but I know that it more than tripled in a year in terms of our share. Well, we have a very small amount of the overall sales through Amazon, but that is now tripling. Trade [books, or books that are intended for the general public] are probably about 5% of our business as Mifflin Harcourt, so it doesn’t always get a lot of mind share, I guess; the numbers don’t stick with me as some of the K-12 [numbers] do. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: I see. So you use your own offering for CRM within RightNow?

LO: Yes. We use our own system out of the cloud and have our own dedicated team that manages it separately from how we do that for our clients. For our expense management, we do that out of the cloud with Concur. For business travel, we use a cloud-based solution from Orbitz. Our business compensation works out of a sales compensation using Xactly. We do a lot security work using cloud-based solutions like Qualys, and there are a variety of cloud-based corporate tools that we use. We have ticketing systems for some of our operational change management, for which we use Jira. So, we use most of the types of solutions that are available and are even used in many other corporate enterprises that don’t have an aggressive cloud computing strategy. You will find a bunch of those cloud-based applications; say even WebEx and other types of Web conferencing solutions. Those too are technically cloud-based solutions that people run on-premise. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Wilcox, CIO of HMH Publishing (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Interesting! Assembling your own books – how are you doing that? What is the workflow for a teacher to assembling his or her own book?

PW: This for us is very new. What we do is have a consultant come in and work with teachers to work through the process. So, it’s somewhat driven by a technology consultant with a deep educational background because the idea of ‘assembling your own book’ is not completely ready for an individual teacher to just sit down and work into her own curriculum. That is a lot farther along on the higher education side, where there are organizations such as Blackboard that have been doing things like that for quite some time. It is a lot newer to the K-12 space. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Wilcox, CIO of HMH Publishing (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: I see. That actually gives me a good segway into one of the most important discussions in your industry today, or at least the way the greater technology world hears about your industry, which is the movement of textbooks to e-books and the rise of the Kindle and, iPad’s iBook application, and so on. Where are you going? What is your strategy, and when can we expect to see the movement to more e-book solutions for students? >>>