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? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What is the scope of your internal IT organization? What you mentioned just now is the IT infrastructure piece for delivering your cloud-based offering or product as a cloud vendor. What about the internal requirements of RightNow as a company? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Wilcox, CIO of HMH Publishing (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What is your perspective on what Google is doing with Google Docs and Google Apps?

PW: Well, for a lot of these kinds of applications is the same thing with the similar applications for the iPad. Our problem, or I guess our challenge, is compatibility. It is compatibility with legacy-created documentation that is our biggest hurdle. For example, Keynote is very widely used for high-quality presentations for the sales force to schools districts and the like. Some of those things don’t really convert well back and forth. We also really haven’t had, as of yet, significant adoption of the Google operating system. Speaking of mobility, we are trending away from the BlackBerry which used to be our corporate standard. Now we are going more toward the Android operating system and the iPhone and iPad. >>>