SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“I think it’s reasonably well understood now that business is moving faster and faster than it ever has. Look at the examples of the social media world of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, Instagram, and the speed of adoption of those technologies. So, things aren’t slowing down, they’re getting faster. And if you’re going to compete in that world, it makes sense to say that you’ve got to adapt as things adapt to new competition, new requirements from customers, expectations, etc.

So if you’re stuck with some technology, you don’t have to refer to it as “legacy” or “old” if you like, but if you’re stuck with what you’ve got, it makes logical sense that if it’s one thing you can’t adapt or you can’t change, it’s going to hold you back. If you’ve got a set of technology that doesn’t allow you to do the latest and greatest thing, you’re going to be held back, and therefore at a competitive disadvantage. So, you don’t have to be disparaging about the old world technology, it’s just that it’s automatically going to be old very quickly and therefore consuming stuff as and when you need it from the cloud, makes more sense and delivers agility into the business.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“So, I think in the IT industry itself – huge changes are going to go ahead and we want to capitalise on that in one sense by helping with that consolidation. And I think the changes that are happening, and we focus on the SMB, and the changes there are it’s all about the fact that they’re going to be able to be more productive, more agile, and therefore more competitive than they ever have been, if they adopt the right cloud technologies.

And in order for them to adopt the right technology, the cloud industry has to simplify what it does. Because it’s a big barrier for them consuming for the SMB that cloud stuff and it’s evidence in research because it’s too complex, too many vendors saying too many things that are too confusing and too different. And that’s why we focus all our efforts on pre-packaging technologies into solutions to make it easier to consume.”

Discover how to create and implement a robust business continuity & disaster recovery (BCDR) plan for your business. Find out how to gain management buy-in, how creating a disaster could prevent one and understand the case for cloud-based BCDR.

How to write a robust Business Continuity & Disaster recovery (BC DR) plan 19-03-2015 from Cloud

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“It’s 50/50. We deal with the CIO or IT manager, or whatever job title you want but increasingly directors, owner managers of the business, line-of-business managers. I think it’s something like 40 or 45% of IT now is bought outside of IT. And so, if you’re providing a marketing system it’s not necessarily going to go via the IT department. But clearly, the IT department, what we’re finding is they’re adapting too. Internal IT departments themselves are becoming more like brokers. Instead of a fiefdom, they’re having to embrace the fact that if we don’t adapt, as an internal department, we’re going to find ourselves disintermediated or by-passed by the business owners or the business managers who are just going to buy stuff directly that they see. And that’s the whole consumerisation of IT, isn’t it?

The idea that it’s no longer good enough to say ‘you have to wait six months or eight months to have a limited function of feature-sets in a certain an application’, when you’ve got more features at home on your iPhone or your tablet for a much lower cost. So, you can’t pull the wool over the business users’ eyes anymore like you used to. So yeah, the business owner is becoming more educated on the line of business, they know more than they used to. They used to have to wait for the PowerPoint presentation to come along and be told what technology they needed. Now, they’re educating themselves and they know much more. Even before they make an enquiry of a potential vendor, they know much more. And they’re really just checking out who is the best potential supplier of what they already know they need, as opposed to sitting back, cap in hand and taking what’s given to them.

So yeah, there is a big change from just IT-central purchasing through to the business side too.”

With business mobility and BYOD creating more gaps in our mobile data protection, check out this animated video to find out how HP Connected Backup can help.

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“You used the term “failing forward” and we tend to use a similar term: “failing fast”. And I think we are seeing that businesses are more willing to just give it a go, it sounds like a little bit slapdash but it isn’t.

If you get some technology out there or launch a new project into the market and are able to see how it works and whether the customers like it very quickly, and therefore get to iterate and get into version two, three, four, five, six and you can get to version nine of something, whatever your product is, when someone else is still doing research and just about to launch beta and version one.

And that ability of “fail fast and learn” is evolutionary in one sense, you know “Darwinian” in another sense, it’s just very quick compared to how it used to be. And I think, yes, the sort of customers that we tend to work with are those that are adopting cloud, so probably naturally we see those that are more willing to do that. When we’ve tried to sell to other industries that are perhaps more conservative, I think that might not be the case but we don’t deal with them actually, so we deal with those that want to innovate and want to move fowarded very quickly.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“To claim that we know where we are on a wave, I’d be a little bit arrogant because some of the things that you see coming out today, none of us would have predicted a few years ago.

I think we all know that when it comes to technology, one thing I’ve learnt over time is that disruption always take longer to arrive than people predict. But when it does it’s always much more significant than they’ve ever thought it would be. So, I think we’re on the cusp of cloud going mainstream. For those companies that have either been large enough to have people dedicated enough to look at it, but the fact that it can go mainstream in its market adoption is where that’s going to free a whole bunch of businesses to do stuff we don’t know that they’re capable of doing.

So yes, you can get access to analytics that go from a spread sheet to a massive analytic system is hugely powerful to an SMB. And what you can then do with it is difficult to predict. One thing is true, change is constant, that’s the only thing we do know is constant is change, and what got you here today isn’t going to get you there tomorrow. And therefore, you’ve got to say well, it doesn’t matter what we’ve got now, you know, start from now and look at what’s available to us going forward, and that’s what a business can do. I mean certain industries are more able to do that and are more forward thinking where it’s very competitive and they have to adapt. The recruitment industry has to adapt; it’s so competitive, they’re always looking at new things. Certain other industries perhaps are being less. The legal industry for example, dare I say it, until the de-regulation that’s now upon them with TESCO law and all that sort of stuff. They’re only just starting to think about having to compete and then starting to look at new technologies. And those that do are just going to leapfrog the rest, and leave them behind.

But who knows what the future holds? It’s a constant change.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“Cloud has done a great job at peaking the interest of the consumer and the business. In the industry we know that’s a refresh of different things: ASP, SAS and all sorts of out-sourcing that have been used before, but many of those terms haven’t sparked the interest of the consumer.

So cloud’s done a great job there, but it’s riddled with confusion. “Cloud washing” and all that non-sense and, I think, in many ways that if I go and ask someone in the street they think about storing my photos, and tunes and it’s nothing to do with delivering agility and productivity, and all that stuff into the business. And at the same time cloud is used to describe many things. I’ve heard it’s used to describe a monitor, a cloud monitor, because it was powered over the LAN. It’s used for out-sourcing, it’s used for storage, it’s used for computing, it’s used for the email, for voice, etc.

So, I think it adds a lot of confusion as well and I think one of the things the industry has to do is sort its act out in terms of providing clarity about what cloud really means to the business. To business in general.”