Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 1)

Everything is moving to the cloud and hotels are no exception. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Ric Leutwyler: I was born in Austin, Texas. I have moved 18 times in my life and career in the US. I have a double degree in both Marketing and Human Resources as I had interest in both areas. I started my career with AT&T before the divestiture. It was one of the largest companies in the world. I was involved with different parts of the organization during my time there. I think I was in eight different roles in eight and a half years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 6)

Jeff Lawson: Now what you’re seeing in Web 2.0 is this more vertically integrated approach where instead of just veneer on top of the existing industry, you actually have companies that are cutting all the way through the stack and existing industry to provide a better solution overall. Coming back to homes, I can now buy a home, end-to-end, using WebGen. I can even buy a Tesla e-commerce on their website. That’s the end-to-end experience of Tesla using software. Look at Airbnb. It’s actually getting me in the room that I’m going to be renting. Same thing goes for Uber. It’s actually the means and the entirety of the customer experience. That’s a fascinating trend. This is the next evolution of using software, the Internet, and technology to disrupt businesses. The first one was just the veneer on top. Now we’re cutting deep into actually providing the service as well, which is on the consumer side. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your developer ecosystem? I imagine that part of your strategy is to unleash the whole creativity of the developer ecosystem on your platform.

Jeff Lawson: Yes, we have over 400,000 developers using our platform.

Sramana Mitra: Are these large companies? What’s the mix of that ecosystem?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very good discussion. Give me some more interesting use cases. What other segments or interesting creative ideas are you seeing in your developer ecosystem?

Jeff Lawson: We’ve got pretty much every sharing account including companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit. In the sharing economy, you use technology to connect supply and demand using the Internet, and now more importantly, using mobile. Part of creating that market involves facilitating the transaction and communication between the buyer and seller. Twilio provides that to all these companies.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 3)

Jeff Lawson: What Uber has done is, take the communication part of calling a taxi and seamlessly integrate it into the whole experience. Communication used to be a standalone activity. Now communication just becomes part of the workflow that you have when you use Uber. We see this in many software companies. In the transportation space alone, you’ve got Uber and Lift. These are all customers of ours who are using communication to provide a great customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: This is a new category of applications. The call center is an old category. You’re replacing other players who have serviced the call center industry for a long time with a more modern architectural offering. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Given that your primary positioning is that you are replacing hardware-based call center solution with a software and cloud-based call center solution, whom are you replacing in terms of vendors?

Jeff Lawson: It’s the typical hardware-centric companies like Cisco or Via. These are people who are trying to sell you a monolithic, typically hardware, but certainly on-premise stack.

Sramana Mitra: The primary functionality there is this call routing for call centers that needed hardware so far?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 1)

Did you know that the core technology at the heart of apps like Uber and Lyft is a relatively lesser known cloud-based communication platform called Twilio? Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Twilio to begin with.

Jeff Lawson: I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Twilio. Twilio is communication-as-a-service. What we do is we allow companies to use our communication infrastructure running in the cloud to build and innovate applications that they need to communicate. Customers span companies from the Fortune 500 to innovative startups like Airbnb and Uber. They use Twilio’s communication capabilities to fundamentally create a better customer experience that closes the loop in some kind of application that needs to talk to human beings. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 4)

Scott McIsaac: It comes down to having that experience and application knowledge. We don’t get into the functional support of the application. For example with SAP, the business process side is still handled by the customers. They handle all the workflows within the system and all the intricacies there. We typically manage the bases level, which is making sure that the database is running, that we understand that the job are optimized, and that the systems are performing.

That specialization is about understanding the infrastructure layer of it. A lot of it is database. In today’s world, it is about how the database works in virtualization and what virtualization technology we are using. >>>