Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Scott Martin, CIO Of Nonni’s Food Company (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

Sramana: Is your architecture a private cloud, or is it hosted on a vendor’s site?

Scott: Well, we have a mix of both depending on the applications themselves. In the case of some new applications that we may implement in the future, we are having that debate as well. For example, a document management system. There are nice ones out there available for us to use from vendors that offer hosted solutions. However, in my opinion, these vendors want higher fees to run it on their cloud, whereas I can throw down one of my own within my private cloud and buy the software and its updates, right through the year, in a cost-effective way. It makes more sense from a cost standpoint to run my document management system on a virtual private cloud. For future applications, we will have to go through a similar decision-making process. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Scott Martin, CIO Of Nonni’s Food Company (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

In this interview, Scott Martin, CIO at Nonni’s Food Company, shares his insights on cloud computing. It is interesting to note how a mid-size company such as Nonni’s Foods is harnessing private clouds to drive operational efficiency not only in IT but also across sales and billing. This enables the company to not only focus more on core business activities but also to deploy solutions that they could not think of earlier, before cloud business models, due to the upfront costs involved. There are some interesting thoughts on deploying a document management system in a private cloud by a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company such as Nonni’s Foods. In the entrepreneurship section, Scott discusses some of his wish-list items from a thin client, iPad perspective and exploiting the full potential of mobile devices in an enterprise scenario. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Stamas, VP of IT, Mohawk Fine Papers (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: In this context, I want to go back to you said about the expertise of architecting a private cloud and virtualized environment – it just does not exist with a lot of SMEs.

PS: I agree with that. It comes down to a definition of what a private cloud is. Now, I will tell you that our internal environment is 100% virtualized. Everything is running on VMWare. That wasn’t difficult to do; it honestly wasn’t. In fact, it was easier to build a virtual environment as opposed to physical environment, and it is certainly easier to manage. Once we embraced VMWare, it was a game changer. Now what we are doing – are we are selling these services back to our user base? No. But setting up VMWare within an organization is pretty straightforward, easy to do, and clearly within the realm of SME businesses. In fact, the evolution to that is the virtual desktop interface. We would like to take virtualization to our desktops. That is very attractive and doable for SMEs, and there is a deep support system out there for us to do that. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Stamas, VP of IT, Mohawk Fine Papers (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Let’s switch the discussion to security; what are your perspectives on cloud security?

PS: Security is definitely part of it, along with the larger governance issues of outsourcing, hosting, or moving applications to the cloud. I am also talking about moving integration into the cloud . But the new rule of the IT function is around the governance of this complementary ecosystem for providers, and security is a very important part of it. We obviously have an obligation to ensure we maintain security through architecting and selecting the right service providers and through day-to-day monitoring. There is something that people tend to miss, which, I argue, is that security inside SaaS data centers inside these cloud providers is far superior than anything we could or would do internally. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Stamas, VP of IT, Mohawk Fine Papers (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Take me through how a SaaS vendor like MercuryGate sits in this. Is MercuryGate receiving data through Liaison, or do you send data to MercuryGate? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Stamas, VP of IT, Mohawk Fine Papers (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What about integration you have done so far? Would you share your thoughts on what role integration has played, how expensive it been, and for your future plans, how are you thinking about integration costs and so forth? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Stamas, VP of IT, Mohawk Fine Papers (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: My other question was, you mentioned that you have moved your transportation management system to cloud. Would you elaborate on that? Is that industry specific? Is it a niche technology?

PS: This is an interesting case I think in the light of what I have already said. We are a manufacturing and distribution company, so the supply chain is important. I mentioned that we differentiate based on speed to get our product to market. We previously had on-premise enterprise management systems that have not met expectations; they essentially do not provide the capability and functionality that we needed. So, we have actually abandoned the on-premise enterprise system in favor of a SaaS application for transport application management. It’s a niche application and deals specifically in TMS. It’s from a company called MercuryGate, a small start-up company with expertise in this kind of transportation management. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Paul Stamas, VP of IT, Mohawk Fine Papers (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Can you describe more the case of your HR application going from $100,000  a year to $20,000 a year? How did you accomplish that? Could you take through the changes you made that resulted in those kind of savings? >>>