Moving Corel Into The Cloud

Corel CEO Tom Berquist reveals his strategies for company-wide SaaS implementations Tom Berquist serves as Corel's CEO, and joined the company as Chief Financial Officer in September 2009. Anyone who has met Tom knows that his evangelism and contagious enthusiasm for consumer tech comes as second nature. As Corel's Chief Financial Officer, Tom led the company's Finance, IT, Customer Support and Manufacturing teams in providing essential support services for the company's global operations. Tom's article is the first in a partner series developed with our friends at SaaSMax.

When Tom Berquist first joined Corel in 2009, the company was a software behemoth - inside and out. Its products - CorelDRAW, Roxio, Pinnacle, Winzip and a host of others - were a familiar sight on bookshelves and CD-ROMs across the country. At the same time, the company’s internal infrastructure was built on a complex network of onsite data centers and customized software platforms like Oracle, Onyx and IBM NetSphere.

Tom set out to change that. With a tech background himself, Tom had spent years finding SaaS solutions for Ingres, his previous Silicon Valley company. At Corel, his goal was to cut costs and increase efficiencies across the company with a broad-based migration to cloud systems. In just four years, he’s implemented nearly a dozen SaaS solutions and saved the company at least $2 million a year.

Here’s how he did it.

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