Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Hakan Nordfjell, Senior VP of eBanking and eCommerce at Gemalto (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Across your activities within Gemalto, where do you think you’re providing the maximum leadership as far as financial technology is concerned.

Hakan Nordfjell: The thought leadership that we provide is within the online banking security and actually how you drive that into a new domain. Securing access from a person to a bank perspective might be interesting. It’s very important for a bank. While doing this, we are looking much further at how we can actually create a digital landscape.

By having the right security within the end users’ hands in some sense and empowering them better, >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Hakan Nordfjell, Senior VP of eBanking and eCommerce at Gemalto (Part 1)

In this wide-ranging discussion, perhaps the most thought-provoking question is the one about data and who owns it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Gemalto to our audience.

Hakan Nordfjell: I’m responsible for the Digital Banking segment within Gemalto. Gemalto is a digital security company based in Amsterdam. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have a lot of customers switching from Zoho to your platform?

Daniel Saks: We would work with Zoho as well. We have many brands in our ecosystem that include those entry-level providers. We think all SaaS brands are great but what we do see is as the complexity of what you need to solve evolves, people gravitate to special providers.

Even in AppDirect, we’ve grown from a couple of people in an apartment to over 700 people in the last several years. First we used an Excel sheet for our CRM. Then we used a basic CRM, but we’ve scaled past that. Then we gravitated to Salesforce. I think >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in your space that what you are doing highlights? It sounds like you are doing this for small to medium businesses. What trends are you seeing?

Daniel Saks: There are three main trends or drivers. The first is that the number of applications available for small businesses have grown exponentially over the last couple of years. Whereas a few years ago, there may have been a dozen cloud services that were relevant to businesses, now many of them are brand names like Boxd and Ecosign.

Now there’re thousands of software-specific applications on the cloud. That could be for a specific department or across a specific >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect (Part 1)

We’ve discussed the trend of small businesses wanting to buy various cloud services from one trusted vendor. This discussion highlights the same trend, but the solution is different. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing to yourself and AppDirect.

Daniel Saks: I’m the President and Co-CEO of AppDirect. AppDirect makes it incredibly easy for businesses around the world to find, buy, and manage cloud software from their local trusted providers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ajay Gulati, CEO of ZeroStack (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking you to be a bit more specific to your domain of expertise. You have a long background in VMWare and you’re doing something that is heavy in cloud infrastructure. Are there more discrete problems that you have seen that if you were starting a company today, you would solve that problem?

Ajay Gulati: The platforms have become easier. If I look at the problems, I feel the problems fall into specific areas like marketing and sales. In most of these areas, people are looking for better solutions. One area where I feel a lot of companies struggle with is doing marketing.

Sramana Mitra: That is a very crowded field. This is why I’m asking you specifically about the infrastructure side because we cover the application side very heavily. Marketing technologies on the cloud is a very crowded field.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ajay Gulati, CEO of ZeroStack (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Does that map to any specific types of verticals or industries where there is more activity than others along these lines?

Ajay Gulati: It does. If you think of the cases where people are more prone to building apps, it used to be primarily the technology industry where you would have tech companies building a lot of software. You may have a couple of other industries like biotech or financial services. Over the past five to seven years, more and more companies are becoming software companies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ajay Gulati, CEO of ZeroStack (Part 1)

This discussion focuses on the infrastructure end of private clouds.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and ZeroStack to our audience.

Ajay Gulati: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of ZeroStack. I started this company with a couple of other friends about three years ago. Prior to ZeroStack, I was at VMWare for a long time. One of the problems that we noticed with lots of companies is that there were companies who were looking at this new cloud-based model of IT both for building their applications and deploying their >>>