tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5719332149137711434.post1894853623804971441..comments2024-02-22T23:24:18.865+11:00Comments on Leon's CRM Musings: What is the Cloud?Leon Tribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05713816319075495059noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5719332149137711434.post-90691795662125343702011-07-04T09:30:16.464+10:002011-07-04T09:30:16.464+10:00When a member of your team is working on your infr...When a member of your team is working on your infrastructure you're trusting them, this is no different, there is no change in control so you're loosing nothing but gaining substantial benefits by having experts do the work for you. <br /><br />The fear of loosing control is nothing but fear of change, which is perfectly understandable. The people that stand out are those who embrace it, understand it & begin to deliver tangible business benefits as a result.<br /><br />Something that is easily achieved with Salesforce, Google Apps compared to MS. I know i've come from using MS exclusively & i'm seeing significant benefits no longer using it.<br /><br />We deliver change faster at less cost to a higher level of quality than was ever possible with MS.<br /><br />Here is a good example: http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/microsoft-office-365-shows-how-to-tank-the-cloud-concept/11473Andy Pattinsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12916114486920373050noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5719332149137711434.post-82925240407202580532011-07-03T23:26:57.465+10:002011-07-03T23:26:57.465+10:00There are two issues which are being confused here...There are two issues which are being confused here. The question is "Do you lose control when you trust someone else to manage your infrastructure?" The answer is undeniably "yes". Almost by definition, the act of trusting someone else means losing direct control of that thing you are trusting them with. For example, perhaps you have guaranteed to your customers their data will never leave local shores. Perhaps the method in which the power is generated for the servers is important. Perhaps the brand of the servers themselves is important and so on.<br /><br />The second question is "Is what I lose outweighed by what I gain?". As implied by my conclusion, I believe many companies will significantly gain by transferring their software from internal server rooms to an outsourced provider. Many companies do not care about where the data is geographically stored, many companies do not care about the intimate nature of how their data is being backed up on the Amazon S3 service; they simply trust it is being done better than they ever could. <br /><br />For losing a little bit of control, they gain a significant competitive advantage. <br /><br />If Peter Coffee of salesforce.com was playing Jeopardy, the question he would be answering would be "What do you consider best practice for servers providing XaaS/cloud offerings?" Let us say, when it started out, salesforce.com ran on a 486 in Benioff's basement (I am guessing it probably did not but this is a hypothetical example). Does the fact that it defies Coffee's definition make it any less a cloud application? Or does it just make it a poorly deployed one?<br /><br />As for the suggestion that salesforce.com is 'light years' ahead of Microsoft's equivalent (Dynamics CRM), all independent analyst reports I have read, including Forrester and Gartner, disagree. Generally speaking, the products are considered equally good. The place where Dynamics CRM and Sales Cloud significantly differ is in the cost of their online offerings. Dynamics CRM is 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of the equivalent salesforce.com offering.<br /><br />Similarly, of the independent reports I have read, most compare Office 365 favourably to Google apps.Leon Tribehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05713816319075495059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5719332149137711434.post-84173637381986873332011-07-03T21:45:50.706+10:002011-07-03T21:45:50.706+10:00Happy to expand on my rhetoric from twitter. I str...Happy to expand on my rhetoric from twitter. I strongly disagree with the common sentiment that you're loosing control when you use cloud based systems.<br /><br />Loosing control of what? You're letting the experts run your systems, a business with 100,000 clients on their system invest a lot more in security, stability, redundancy, monitoring...than any business running on premise, hybrid or so called private cloud ever could.<br /><br />Peter Coffee gives the most succinct & accurate explanation of cloud 'Systems that are architected from the ground up to be Multi-Tenent & Auto-Scaling'<br /><br />These offer many benefits most importantly the democratization of systems, a single user benefits in the same way as a client with 100,000 users.<br /><br />Cloud is so much more than moving systems or parts of systems out of on premise, this is the point MS miss and it's why salesforce.com & google apps are light years ahead of them.Andy Pattinsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12916114486920373050noreply@blogger.com