Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Everbridge CEO Jaime Ellertson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of trends, what kind of adoption do you see in the citizens in signing up for these kinds of alerts through mobile devices?

Jaime Ellertson: There’s a couple of interesting things. I mentioned at the start about significant events like Super Bowl or the papal visit. In an event like the Super Bowl, the majority of the people attending aren’t from San Francisco. They’re from out of town and they’ve purchased tickets. How do you get those people into the databases?

One of the ways we do that is through a product Nixle which is our community engagement tool. There, you can simply advertise a keyword to text in. You texted that to the code and you were instantly included for Homeland Security, San Francisco, and Santa Clara for any major event that came up. That’s another way to supplement that to get people to opt in. Then we naturally go back to those people afterwards and say, “We see your mobile number. If you want to build a profile to get alerts for your community, you can do so by adding this other information.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good thing because your contribution is in enhancing the quality of education, so the ones who don’t have that quality of education will gain more from your technology.

Norm Wu: Right. Just like with MOOCs, you can go out and find the best educators and the best content. We’ve had a major effort to build the world’s largest database of evidence-based medicine tying symptoms and diagnosis together. You can take all that and you can make it available not only to the other 90% of the US but to all the schools around the world in a very scalable way. You need nothing more than a web browser. There’s no software to download. There are no plugins.

We simulate everything in the cloud and then we push it out through just an HTML5 web browser. We’ve got a lot of technology behind that, which is why the NSF is funding us. When we think of our mission and vision, we are thinking about how we will take the best content and the best way of delivering learning through active simulation and making that scalable to the entire world. That’s what we’re excited about. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Everbridge CEO Jaime Ellertson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about trends. What trends do you see in the public sector? What are cities and counties trying to do?

Jaime Ellertson: We’re in a little bit of a unique space. We’re a technology company that has a user population today of about 120 million. It’s a pretty broad distribution. It’s a global platform in over 200 countries. We affect a lot of people. We also do something that I don’t think anyone can claim. We actually do good everyday. We make a difference in someone’s safety on a daily basis.

In the citizen application and in the broad spectrum of man-made or natural disasters, most people today feel that it’s an increasingly distributed or global environment. You don’t really have to go farther than look at a war in Syria that’s now affecting all of Europe. You can’t escape that. The ability for us to be mobile and be in more places means that when something does happen, we expect to be notified. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We know quite a bit about that segment—stuff like Concordia’s huge programs in nurse practitioner training. Do you provide the content infrastructure for them?

Norm Wu: It’s very much the same model. They can either create their own cases or they can license cases that we’ve worked with outside educators on. Our move into nurse practitioners education, which now accounts for over half of our customer base, has been more recent. Our cases, by and large, have been developed by medical school educators but they’re using them anyway.

What we’d like to do is develop a whole series of cases that are developed by nurse practitioner educators and which are more targeted towards them. As you may know, with a nursing background, you tend to think more holistically about patients. When you’re asking them questions about their medical history and symptoms, you may ask about what’s going on at home that’s causing the stress that is contributing to the illness. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Everbridge CEO Jaime Ellertson (Part 1)

If the Brussels attacks have made you wonder about alert systems and such, this discussion will shed some light.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Everbridge.

Jaime Ellertson: I’m the Chairman and CEO of Everbridge. Everbridge is a provider of enterprise SaaS applications that automate information exchange to keep people safe and business running. It is a fast-growing provider of enterprise SaaS applications that automate information exchange to keep people safe and businesses running.

The markets that we participate in are everything from emergency notification, which would be sending out communications like recently in Brussels, to communications and information exchange around IT outages. It could also be a connected hospitals – code alerts and telemedicine – or large community >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Managed services is an area that you see that is going to develop further?

Ali Din: Yes, not just in the traditional sense of managing and monitoring the network and the data centre, but going into these specific use cases as well. We need managed security services. We need managed services around on-boarding employees. I don’t know if you’ve read this book The Experience Economy, but I see that definitely coming in where the service industry and all the work that people put in to provide value-add and differentiation around services.

Now it’s really differentiating around the experience. It’s getting even harder for companies to hire employees that are more and more picky about where they’re working. A company must provide an absolutely memorable experience not just for their customers, but even on the recruiting side so that employees want to stay. Doing all these things is not easy so managed services is going to have an open opportunity to get into that space and be able to provide these services to companies as they’re trying to deal with all this change with, if you will, the modern workspace. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does your competition look like? Who else is providing this kind of solution? Is this a space that is developing from a vendor point of view?

Kurt Heikkinen: It is. One of the first questions that we receive is, “How are you different from something like Skype or some general video chat tool?” You may recall earlier that I specifically used the term purpose-built. Our primary competition is general chat. We compete very favourably especially when you think of a larger organization and not an SMB client who has a couple of hundred employees that might hire a couple of dozen.

We’re talking about clients who are a few thousand to tens of thousands of employees and they’re hiring hundreds to thousands of employees a year. They value their employer and consumer brand. They value an experience that’s proven and global. What we’ve built is something that is purpose-built to meet the requirements of talent acquisition – the importance of data security, scalability, candidate experience, and integration. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you put all this in perspective for us in terms of the trends that you’re seeing in the space?

Ali Din: Specifically in our space, what we’re seeing is this evolution of mobility. People need to access multiple devices. The average person is carrying more devices or has access to multiple devices whether they’re in the office or home. Now what we’re seeing is that companies understand the virtual desktop models. Now they’re getting more mature and specific about their needs. We call this the evolution of the workspace.

It’s getting even more finite in terms of their requirements. Some people say, “I don’t need the entire Windows desktop because I use OneDrive. I just need specific applications.” As a result of that, we’re seeing this evolution of people now moving from a desktop virtualization to just purely worrying about the application and how to connect those applications. That’s probably one of the trends that we’re seeing. >>>