By Jeff Garell
I had the good fortune to
attend the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit last week in beautiful Phoenix,
Arizona. This conference offers the opportunity to talk to representatives
from a large cross section of cloud service providers. Some of the names
are quite well known such as Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, and Hewlett Packard
Enterprise and others you may not have like Odin, Intermedia, and NCR (among
many others).
I should clear up that this
conference is exclusively focused on companies like CTG that help customers
make informed decisions about technology. I mention this simply to explain
that many of the sessions were about attempting to convince us to sign on with
them to sell their stuff and how to market/price/deliver these services.
Candidly, it can be a bit of a meat grinder at times but the alternative is to
attempt to reach out and coordinate with each of these organizations
individually with the possibility of missing some of the lesser known names
that may be a great fit. And there’s no way to do all of that in 2 days
without a conference like this one.
So after being educated,
solicited, and sold to for two days here are just some of the highlights and
takeaways:
The Thursday morning keynote
by Marc Randolph, one of the founders of Netflix, was thoroughly entertaining,
informative, and entrepreneurial. He spoke about the process that he and
his cofounder went through before finally settling on this twice discarded idea
of sending movies through the mail. Interestingly, the idea originated in
the days of VHS tapes and was undoable in terms of mailing & storage costs
for that format. The DVD technology shift enabled them to re-visit the
idea a second time, but they had another thing they were pursuing, so they
shelved it again. Eventually they came back around to this DVD
through the mail thing and got started. Marc discussed the trial and error
processes, the successful and unsuccessful campaigns, learning to iterate their
promotions and changes more quickly, and how they were at one point perched on
the edge of closing up the shop. He told the story of their meeting
with Blockbuster and for the low price of $50 million they could be
purchased. Blockbuster said no (obviously) and on the plane ride back
from that meeting Marc and his partners decided to take down Blockbuster, who
then was the largest player in the movie rental business, bar none. And
they eventually did. All in all the message was to continue to generate
ideas, spend a little time determining the feasibility, quickly chuck the ones
that don’t make the cut (you don’t have that kind of time to waste, do you?),
and move forward with the promising one(s). That ideas come from
everywhere and usually from a “pain” that you experience – as in, “wouldn’t it
be nice if someone could find a way to fix [insert a daily annoyance you experience]?” Why not be that “someone”?
A meeting with Dropbox was interesting
and enlightening. I’ve been a Dropbox user since getting a beta invite a
lifetime ago but honestly didn’t look into, or understand, what kind of
business/enterprise offering they had, or even why. I walked into the
meeting a bit skeptical about what I would possibly learn…and said as much,
politely of course. It turns out, there is a “there” there and it falls
under the “Shadow IT” umbrella. For those that don’t know what that
means, it’s when your employees go outside of the internal IT services being
offered and sign up for things like Dropbox in order to perform their
job. For example, Dropbox makes it really easy to share documents with
anyone in a secure manner. So imagine a marketing department needing to
share image files with an outside ad agency or print shop that can’t be emailed
because of their size. Poof! Dropbox account. The problem with
that approach is multifold. First is that there’s no way for the business to
know exactly what data is being shared outside the organization and to whom.
The enterprise edition gives IT the control and reporting to know these
details. Second, is that the Dropbox terms and conditions state that the
data in an account belongs to the account holder. Imagine you have to let
someone go and learn that they have been using this unmanaged & unapproved
service that is now full of your proprietary information. Dropbox
considers it the account holder’s, not yours. Finally, there are
integrations and add-ons to do things like Rights Management and Data Loss
Protection.
On a similar note, I attended
the Microsoft Secure Productive Enterprise pre-conference session to learn
about new advances in Office 365 and how it continues to improve security in a
cloud connected world. The session focused on what you get with the
addition of the Enterprise Mobility & Security option – and there’s a
lot. Microsoft covered quite a bit in the two hour session and it
could have gone much longer once Q&A started. In a nutshell, this
additional service gives you the ability to manage and control mobile devices,
advanced eDiscovery, and create policies around encryption, rights management,
and Data Loss Protection to name just a few things. These kinds of
features are important for everyone but exceptionally important for those
industries where data loss is an expensive proposition (I’m looking at you,
healthcare, legal, financial, and utilities).
There was so much more in
that whirlwind two day conference and I’m still going through my notes and will
be grabbing presentations as soon as they’re made available – so there will
possibly be a part two to this post. The only item on my wish list
for this conference, and keep in mind I’m a grizzled old nerd, is that there
were technical deep dive or hands on options. It’s one thing to tell a
room full of sales guys that your product does x or y that are thinking “show
me the money!”, it’s another when you have folks like me (and there were many)
that are thinking “show me the console!”. I’m hoping there will be
a technical track added in the future. The good news is I got to meet all
of the right people to setup trials and demos to get my hands on those consoles
– which also will undoubtedly spawn more blog posts. (You have been warned.)
Jeff Garell is the co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.
