Cloud Security and Availability: Better or Worse?

Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75) 

A few days ago, Cisco released the results of a survey with 1,300 IT decision-makers and influencers from across the world. In summary, Cisco found that cloud adoption is being driven from executive levels but IT decision-makers continue to be held back by concerns around visibility, security, availability and performance.

This picture stands in stark contrast to what we observe among our customers and prospects who are focused on driving business results using cloud solutions.

The explanation lies in the difference between how people perceive cloud solutions before they have used them vs. their perceptions after using cloud solutions. In late 2010, we worked with a leading 3rd party survey company to understand the experience of cloud adopters at ~150 mid to large enterprises.

As expected, we found that those who had actually used cloud applications and platforms found that their cloud solutions were easier to maintain, cheaper and more flexible. More surprisingly, we also found that the vast majority of cloud adopters found their cloud solutions to be AS GOOD OR BETTER than on-premise solutions for security, availability and reliability. Clearly, once people actually use cloud applications and platforms, their perceptions about past objections change dramatically.

So, what does this mean for those who are evaluating cloud solutions? Based on our experience with 100s of enterprises, we recommend two immediate actions:

• First, get educated about the security and reliability of the cloud solutions you’re considering. Most cloud solutions offer a “trust” site where they share availability, performance and downtime information. See for yourself if the cloud application is more or less available than what you provide internally. 
• Second, try out the cloud application to see how it performs for you. Unlike traditional solutions, most cloud solutions offer simple trials so you can be up and running without much investment and no more infrastructure than your web browser. 

Ultimately, each organization needs to make a decision that makes the most sense given their business priorities. But, for many organizations, cloud solutions offer a superior experience at a lower cost so they’re definitely worth a look!

Maintaining Your IT Fitness Level

Glenn Weinstein
CIO, Appirio
@glennweinstein

What’s the best single measure of IT success - increased productivity, or reduced spend? Two colleagues staked out opposite positions on this blog recently. As CIO at Appirio, naturally, my instinct is to cop out and say “both are important.” But let me be more specific.

Let’s think of IT as an athlete on our corporate team. We want lean, well-conditioned athletes at all positions. Getting a team ready to play means getting everyone in shape. The first step might be to set a goal weight. This goal will be different depending on the type of sport, and the position. An Olympic gymnast will likely have a very different goal weight than an NFL lineman. While there is no right or wrong goal weight, we all know that being overweight is never good for fitness.

Think of your total IT costs like your goal weight. It makes no sense to try to come up with a single number (e.g. “less than 3% of revenues”) that’s right for everyone. Set a target based on the kind of company you are, and the market you play in. Certain industries, such as financial services or consulting, naturally rely more heavily on tech spending than others, such as retail or construction.

Athlete can take both healthy and unhealthy steps towards reaching a goal weight. They can eat nutritious foods, or they can go on a starvation diet. CIOs also have healthy and unhealthy options. They can ensure funds are allocated towards technologies that yield the best returns, or they can cut essential productivity tools and defer needed upgrades in the single-focused pursuit of cost reduction.

Once you set a goal weight that’s right for your company, you’ll want to focus on your overall fitness level, and the abilities you derive from it. A good athlete eliminates wasted motion, improves technique, and is able to put most of their strength behind their action, whether it’s performing a backflip or swinging a bat. The IT equivalent is how you spend your limited IT budget, typically broken into three categories - run (nondiscretionary spend on continued operations), grow (supporting organic business growth), and transform (supporting new business models).

Gartner’s January 2012 “IT Metrics: IT Spending and Staffing Report” shows that, on average, 63% of our spend is on “run,” with only 21% on “grow” and 16% on “transform.” While these numbers are trending in the right direction - in 2007, they were 67%, 20%, and 13%, respectively - the amount of spend dedicated towards maintaining the status quo remains far too high in our industry. This is like a baseball player who isn’t leaning into the pitch and is hitting off the back foot. Instead of driving the ball, we’re limply popping out to the infield.

My own experience, both as Appirio CIO and as an adviser to many of our customers, is that shifting towards cloud computing enables a major focus shift away from “run” expenditures. Fewer people and resources are needed to keep the lights on, so the “build” and “transform” projects get more IT attention. I think we can flip the 63/37 ratio over the next several years by continuing the transformation towards public-cloud-enabled IT. It’s like a hitter who starts taking more solid swings at the ball, hits more line drives, and ultimately drives in more runs.

Therefore, the best single measure of IT success - assuming you’re at your goal weight and in peak physical condition (i.e. your IT spend is right-sized for your business) - is how much of your IT spend you’re able to put towards growing and transforming, rather than merely running, your business.

Play ball!

What is the #1 Metric for IT Success: Business Impact, Cost Savings or Something Else?

By Nara Balakrishna(@bnara75) and Steve Pruden (@stpruden)

Michael Krigsman’s recent post estimating the worldwide cost of IT failure at $3T sparked an internal debate about technology investments and how to measure IT success. In the traditional view of IT as a cost center, success is measured in primarily in terms of IT cost as a percent of revenue. IT leaders are applauded when they can deliver projects under budget, on time, and keep the overall cost low as a percent of revenue. But, is this actually good for the business?

The cost-center view of IT has been challenged recently by the advent of technologies such as cloud, social and mobile that have the potential to impact top-line metrics such as customer engagement, retention, cross-sell and more. In fact, the Hackett group has found that world class companies invest 5% more than the median on technology while spending far less than in areas like Finance, HR and Procurement. Why is this? Is it because forward-thinking companies recognize that IT can be a differentiator and a strategic enabler?

Battle of the Brains - Appirio Experts Debate the Best Single Metric
So, the question we’re debating is, “How IT should be measured?” Is it business impact, cost savings or something else entirely? Here’s one case for business impact as the metric:



On the flip side, here is a case to continue viewing IT as a cost center, where success is measured primarily in terms of IT cost as a percent of revenue:



We’d also love to hear from you. What do you think? Please add your thoughts in comments or tweet them using #appirio #itsuccess.

The CIO of the Future: Conductor not Controller

Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75) and Naoki Tsukamoto (@nikes63)

How will the cloud change the future of the CIO?  At Appirio, we have the privilege of working with innovative CIOs who are shaping their own companies as well as the industry as a whole.  Experiences with these early “cloud first” CIOs provides us insight into how the role of the CIO will evolve in the future.

The pace of change in the IT industry is as rapid as ever and has only accelerated over the past few years. We’re now in the midst of a significant transformation of enterprise technology driven by cloud computing,mobility and social technologies. As the world changes, CIOs are losing decision-making power and many are out of the loop about cloud adoption within their own businesses. Yet, CIOs who embrace these new technologies and drive innovation (such as Enterasys’ Dan Petlon or Flextronics’ Dave Smoley) have become true business advisors and changed the role of IT within their businesses. Here’s what we’ve learned from these innovative CIOs.

Become a Conductor, Rather Than a Controller

Shrinking corporate IT budgets and innovative cloud services have made it possible for business users to fund their own cloud projects. However, without early IT involvement those investments, it will become expensive to scale across the company.  Leading CIOs get involved early in cloud projects in order to become the local experts.   Business units will then seek out the advice of these CIOs, providing the CIO with authority to influence the design of how all these cloud services will interact with each other, as well as with legacy systems. CIOs have to have the credibility to implement distributed controls, orchestrate a variety of services, and maintain a cohesive view of what's happening across the business. This trend was highlighted in a recent Forbes Article by Daryl Plummer, Gartner’s Chief of Cloud Research. 

Focus on Business Outcomes, Rather Than Pure Cost Metrics

These CIOs have recognized that business value is in controlling the vision of outcomes without worrying about who does it.  Traditional measures of success - like reducing headcount or fixed costs - are viewed by the business as low value add.  CIOs that will have a game changing impact on their companies are instead those that can drive discussions on transforming business processes and orchestrate an IT system that can keep pace with the speed of change in their business.  Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook, lives this by focusing his team away from managing the bits and bytes and instead to envisioning what it means to have efficient business processes.  For example, by using cloud-based solutions to manage recruiting and offer letters, his team can focus on business outcomes such as why recruiting cycle times are slowing down and how recruiting processes can be improved to identify and recruit the best talent when it’s needed.  In a traditional IT organization, all IT effort would’ve been focused on planning for capacity to handle inbound applications with little time to think about business outcomes. By using cloud solutions to free their teams from having to expend all of their effort to keep the lights on, these CIOs have been able to break IT out from being a cost center and into business process experts that deliver real business outcomes.

Focus on Your Internal Customers AND Your Business’ Customers

To deliver real business outcomes, CIOs must have their teams engage with all of their users which includes internal business unit customers but also their end customers.  For example, a CRM solution is not complete when you have delivered a solution that helps sales teams manage their leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities. A true CRM solution is one that brings together a complete view of the customer to every interaction that the customer has with the company. Doing this involves bringing together multiple internal applications (sales, support, services, etc) as well as external applications (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, etc.) and creating solutions that bring the right information to the user at the right time. The shift is in thinking - not only about the person who will use the solution within the enterprise but also about the end-customer being served. The CIO of the future spends just as much time thinking about the company's network of stakeholders and how to best engage with them using technology as they do thinking about internal users.

Embrace Consumerization, Rather Than Fighting it

With the broad consumer adoption of devices like the iPhone and iPad, and applications like LinkedIn, Dropbox, Twitter, Evernote and many others, the paradigm of applications in the enterprise is changing dramatically. There are two takeaways for CIOs. First, this is a wave that cannot be controlled - employees will bring their own devices to work. Second, CIOs need to make sure the solutions they provide integrate with and provide a user experience that’s comparable to these applications that employees want to use. This means that CIOs and anyone who is developing enterprise applications need to focus on the user and find out how to create simple and compelling applications that fit within the user’s work process. The days of applications whose user interface stems from the way they store data is over. People will ignore applications that are hard to use and aren’t available on their favorite devices. While CIOs may be able to mandate usage of a small fraction of applications, in most cases applications will need to stand on their own merits.  As a result, leading CIOs and IT departments are increasingly focused on what their users are trying to do and working with them iteratively to build what they need, rather than designing applications purely as systems of record. Of course this doesn’t mean throwing out what you have and starting from scratch but it does mean looking at current systems of record and understanding how the data and transactions they storecan be surfaced in new ways to engage end-users.

Extend Your Team with Crowdsourcing, Rather Than Increasing Headcount

The cloud has changed the way information technology is delivered to enterprises. Now, any company with a browser and an internet connection can access compute power, storage, and  applications as needed. However, when it comes to enterprise development, even cloud development, companies are still using traditional resourcing models. The standardization and public APIs that cloud platforms provide make it possible to work differently. Since everyone is working on the same platforms with the same APIs, it’s possible for anyone to spec an application and tap into a global pool of developers to fulfill that request.  Last year, Appirio launched CloudSpokes, a cloud-focused developer community with more than 37,000 developers available on demand to every enterprise. For example, a customer of ours wanted to build a mobile application to scan attendees at their events. Rather than trying to hire a team of mobile developers, they used CloudSpokes to build out an application in a matter of weeks for a total cost of <$10,000. CloudSpokes and communities like it enable CIOs with a chance to react quickly to changes in the business and test new ideas without building out a team for every potential need.

Ultimately, the CIO of the future focuses on users, customers and business outcomes, rather than on keeping the lights on. This is what IT departments have always aspired to, but now both the technology and the community are in place to enable this vision!

The Vision of Next Generation IT: Learning from Facebook

Sara Campbell

It’s a well-known story and global obsession--the startup founded in a Harvard University dorm room that quickly grew to become the world’s largest social networking site. The popularity, growth and momentum of Facebook’s business are unparalleled and so are the IT practices that enable more than 850 million active users to harness the power and unprecedented collaboration of Facebook.

Having worked with Facebook since early 2010, Appirio has had the pleasure of partnering with Facebook to reimagine what is possible with technology. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with key members of the Facebook team to understand what a “cloud first” mentality means for the IT team delivering business transformation at Facebook.

Facebook CIO Tim Campos shares his vision about the next generation of IT enabled by the cloud.



The Facebook team explains why they needed a partner to move as quickly as their business.



From a global ad sales application to a custom recruiting and HR application to a consigned materials app that manages data center inventory to make sure Facebook is “always up”, Facebook shares first hand how they partnered with Appirio to change the way they do business.

Customer Spotlight - A Q&A with Karen Bintz, BMC Software

By Sara Campbell

In 2011, BMC Software ranked among the top 20 largest software companies in the world.  The company is credited with pioneering the business service management (BSM) concept as a way to help better align IT operations with business needs. Today, the company specializes in both mainframe and distributed technologies that serve multiple functions.

During more than three decades of growth and success, BMC has remained an innovator, always pushing the envelope on technology.  The company’s forward-thinking translates into everything BMC does, including its world-renowned Executive Briefing Center (EBC).  I recently sat down with Karen Bintz, director of customer experience at BMC to talk about the opportunities a recently developed mobile app has brought to the EBC.

Q: Set the stage. Tell me a little about BMC’s Executive Briefing Center?
A: We are very proud to have a world-class Executive Briefing Center and program that we use as a key strategy in the sales cycle to educate customers and prospects on BMC’s products and services. We hold about 300 briefings per year that range from custom briefings for individual companies, to our standard briefings targeted at multi-company audiences.

The EBC has proven itself to be an important revenue driver. In fact, approximately 85 percent of customers and prospects that visit the EBC purchase BMC solutions and the program itself touches about one of every five dollars of sales pipeline opportunity.  Additionally, while the EBC is heralded internally as one of the best selling tools we have, we have also been recognized by the broader industry.  In 2011, BMC’s EBC received the prestigious Briefing Program of the Year Award from the Association of Briefing Program Managers.

Q: It sounds like the EBC runs like a well-oiled machine, why make changes?
A: Last spring when we returned from the award ceremony, we were on cloud nine, but we knew we didn’t want to rest on our laurels. We needed to step up our game and take it to the next level. Debuting a mobile app was the obvious choice.

Q: How did you build the mobile app?  
A: Once it was decided that we wanted to develop a mobile survey application for the EBC, we knew we had to partner with someone who had expertise in the area. The prior year, we successfully worked with Appirio to roll-out our Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation, and had built an excellent working relationship with their team.  It turned out that they also had the mobile expertise we were looking for, making for an easy decision.

Appirio helped develop the survey app with their framework. The app front-ends our Salesforce.com CRM system and has seamless integration to Leads and Contacts.  Additionally, real-time survey feedback is managed directly in Salesforce.com.

Briefing accommodations survey screen

Q: How has the app changed the way BMC does business through the EBC?
It’s been amazing! Now when our customers and prospects walk into our high-tech facility they see iPads at each station rather than a piece of paper and a pen.  This sets the proper image of BMC as a technology innovator, right from the start.  And while the wow factor is impressive, the functionality is even better.

Additionally, up until recently, I had a college intern who would spend 10+ hours each week entering the responses from the EBC surveys. It was time consuming, tedious and extremely inefficient. It required us to shuffle work schedules to make sure the survey data was input and compiled within our 24 hour service level agreement.

With the paper survey, most attendees would wait until the very end to complete it. Now, at the start of each briefing, our facilitator asks the attendees to sign-in and rate their confidence in BMC. Since we receive the data in real-time, we have critical information about the audience’s pre-confidence in BMC right from the start. Our presenters go in knowing who the advocates in the room are and who might need a little more attention. We are able to alter our focus on the spot to address the individuals in the room and directly influence their confidence in BMC. And then at the end of the briefing, when the attendees complete the remainder of the survey, and answer the final question about their current confidence in BMC, we have an accurate representation of how the six hours they spent with us affected their perception of BMC.

Q: What kinds of feedback have you received thus far?
A: Needless to say, it’s been extremely positive. We get compliments from customers all the time about the experience our EBC offers, and our sales reps are constantly vying to get their prospects and customers involved in the EBC. Approximately 81 percent of our sales representatives who make their annual quota send customers and prospects through the EBC, so it’s definitely a measure of success.

Q: What’s next for the EBC?
A: In this mobility phase, we  are pulling information from our attendees. In the next phase, we hope to push information to our attendees. This would allow them to choose presentations, white papers and other collateral and materials from a pick list and then email it directly to themselves or their colleagues.

Q: What advice would you give to others who have Salesforce.com and are considering mobility?
A: I would first say, don’t reinvent the wheel. Partner with a vendor like Appirio who has strong expertise in both Salesforce and mobility. Also make sure, as we did, to have a strong internal project manager who has both the technical aptitude and awareness of the business impact.  In fact, it’s a whole lot like BMC’ s Business Service Management strategy, you need to link IT projects to the needs and goals of the business in order to truly achieve success.

One Small Step For the Cloud Industry, One Giant Leap for Appirio

by Chris Barbin

This morning, Appirio announced that it has raised $60 million from global growth investor General Atlantic - more than 3x what we have previously raised as a company to date.  Given our strong growth, ability to run a profitable services business and general market momentum, the natural question is why raise the capital?  We couldn’t be more excited at all the things this will enable us to do right now, but, to answer fully, we must first take a step back.

We founded Appirio in 2006 because we thought our industry was broken.  We had worked with and for systems integrators (SIs) and experienced first hand how they had engineered their entire business models around the complexity and shortfalls of on-premise technology.  The combination of on-premise technology and traditional system integration was just not working. CIO survey after CIO survey highlighted the central issue of traditional IT - 80% of time and budget keeping the lights on and no time to align with the business.  I saw this firsthand at Borland where when I became CIO, we had a company with 1,000 people and 1,000 servers.

As the cloud emerged, we saw a radically different future for technology in the enterprise.  Enterprises now had the potential to move faster and capitalize on, and maybe even create disruptions in their industries.  Yet, the services ecosystems hadn’t innovated in a decade and were wed to the practices and skills needed to make slow moving on-premise technology work.
We knew we needed to bring Silicon Valley thinking and innovation to the stagnant services model.  In early 2007, we talked about “Services 2.0”, a new services model that could disrupt traditional consulting as radically as we believed the cloud would disrupt on-premise software..

Since then, we’ve been hard at work showing that Appirio can do it better.  As we worked with over 300 enterprises and moved over 1.5 million users to the public cloud, we learned how to use technology and crowdsourcing to power our consulting services in ways that were never possible with on-premise software.  We’ve been privileged to work with innovative companies of all sizes and mindsets, from large and established companies reinventing themselves for a new age like Japan Post to companies that are changing the world like Twitter. The constant across all these customers is a desire to change how they do business using technology.

Our agile delivery approach delivers results quickly, our technology portfolio helps us bring Appirio’s collective experience to every customer and the CloudSpokes community lets us bring the talents of tens of thousands of developers to every project.  And of course the foundation of our success is the set of close partnerships with like-minded cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Workday, Google and Amazon.

Now, five and a half years later, what began as proof of concept is a vibrant and fast-growing global business with nearly 500 full time staff and operations in 3 continents.  Both our customers and their ambitions have grown with us. We believe more than ever that we will disrupt the entire global systems integrator model - and General Atlantic does too.  With their support, and with the public cloud growing in importance each day, Appirio will disrupt more and more of the worldwide IT industry.  We’ll live up to the expectations of leading enterprises like Facebook that are showing us the future by re-imagining what’s possible with technology and demanding an alternative to global systems integrators.

With the investment we are also honored to welcome Gary Reiner to our board of directors.  As the former CIO of GE for 14 years, Gary has shaped many IT leaders across today’s industry. GE and the network of executives it has graduated have the reputation of being pragmatic, cost conscious, ‘show me’ first executives who insist on clear and demonstrable value.  Winning GA and Gary over gave us a no-nonsense filter to distill how we are and will continue to disrupt the IT value chain.  His voice in helping ensure we continue to focus on the pragmatic, future needs of large enterprises will be a welcome addition.

Several months ago we were named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer because of our potential to help change the world through technology. Today, we are stepping up our commitment to deliver the same type of disruption that salesforce.com and Workday have delivered to SAP and Oracle to the traditional systems integrators. As Andy Warhol once said  “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”  We are dedicated to driving that change and taking the success we have had with leading enterprises to more customers across the world and every aspect of the transition to cloud computing.