Building Your Business In The Cloud
By Gennifer Biggs, security, storage, and managed services editor
Imagine starting your business with no investment in IT. You may not even need a physical office. Seriously, just imagine taking those capital investments off your list of "things to find money for" if you're a new business owner. Intrigued? Well, Narinder Singh, CMO and cofounder of IT business Appirio, can tell you exactly how it works. His business is a serverless enterprise and, OK, they do have offices, but a highly mobile workforce that isn't tied to any one location. Why? Because Appirio offers its clients guidance and expertise around cloud computing solutions, so how better to talk strategy around the technology and business advantages of the cloud than to use it yourself?
"We aggressively push the cloud, telling our customers that if they aren't pushing 10% of their IT spend (on people, projects, apps) – to the public cloud each year, they will overspend on IT and be lapped by their competition" Singh told the 270-plus services providers gathered for the Cloud Summit hosted by Ingram Micro in Dallas on June 7. He explained Appirio uses its own business as a case study. "We were from day one a serverless enterprise, and that allowed us to scale from 20 employees to 210 employees while spending about 3% of our revenue on IT. Proof is there in our own success."
He advises the industry to see the cloud as another delivery method, one that is being driven by the training business owners and decision makers get as consumers. (Can we say Facebook and gmail?) "Public cloud computing has disrupted this industry, and it is moving quickly," says Singh, adding that many of the mainstays in the public cloud, such as Appirio partners Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com, were barely relevant six years ago. Singh sees the opportunity for solutions providers as revolving around helping customers through the development of a cloud strategy, then guiding them through cloud migration, cloud development (customized solutions), and finally offering to help manage their cloud infrastructure.
The advantage of cloud, he says, is simple. "We can focus on the end result rather than getting tangled with the hardware and the software; we can focus on one great user experience and then scale it to infinity." Want to learn more? Check out Singh's blog on the Appirio website.