Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dan Raju, CIO Of TradeKing (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Rajdeep Ramsay

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 250,000 investors working on this platform?

Dan Raju: Yes.

SM: The reason I ask this question is that from a cloud technology problem point of view, the problem is serving these 250,000 customers, which is the scale of the customers you are serving, correct? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dan Raju, CIO Of TradeKing (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Rajdeep Ramsay

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Dan. Welcome to our Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series. Let’s begin by talking about what TradeKing does, and what your business is, and what is the scope of cloud deployment we are talking about for your company. Also, would you give us some background about you. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any other thoughts on entrepreneurship directions, ideas, or open problems?

Steven John: Sure. I think there are some interesting things. I am helping to set up ecosystem architectures because we are not used to that in IT; we are used to connecting to server to server. As you move into the cloud you have to connect on-premise, you have to connect cloud to cloud. How does all that work and who in the organization is doing it? Maybe that is an emerging skill or job role as opposed to an entrepreneurial opportunity. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: All that being said, right now we are also doing a parallel series on outsourcing, and outsourcing as an industry is absolutely booming. The players, the vendors and the segment are all doing really well, and I think that will continue for a while. I think there are many regions that are not mature. In the same way that India developed on the wings of outsourcing, there would be other major development economic stories that will come out on the wings of outsourcing.  There will be a labor arbitrage equation that would still be operative for a long time. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: OK. That covers some of the security and fault tolerance issues. Now, what about the organization? Especially since you are in the area of human capital management? Both from the perspective of a CIO hat plus that fact that you are serving a product that is a human capital management product, how has the IT organization changed with your extensive adoption of the cloud? And how are you seeing this in the larger community? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your own operations at Workday now, I know you went across a couple of different organizations and you have been playing with the cloud. When an organization starts to move to the cloud, what are some of the first pieces of that are being moved? In your opinion, what are some of the first pieces that should be moved to the cloud? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: Yes, that is a valid point. But where I was going with that question is that there are a large number of cloud providers operating today. There are the larger providers like Workday and a variety of larger public companies that are already doing very large [implementations] and servicing a large number of customers. Those are more robust in format, but there are lots of very small companies operating that are running cloud services and have customers. My thought is that maybe they are not all that safe. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Steven John: To get back to your original question about architecture points to keep in mind, because of the way the product is architected, we don’t have to customize and our customers don’t have to customize [as they did] in the old way of thinking about it. They don’t have to write code per se; we were able to go in and configure things to meet their needs, and if we can’t, our development cycle is so different from past development cycles, which were over many years, three, four, or six years, and you would have a major upheaval that concerned all resources and cost millions of dollars to update, and a lot of companies skipped it because of how painful it was. >>>