Marketing Project Management

I Google'd "move cloud computing" and 32,900,000 matches came back in .15 seconds. So I'm guessing that anything I say has been said before, ad nauseum. And since I'm not really a tech guy (just enough to be dangerous) I can't really provide any technical insights that others haven't provided.

But, I am a business guy and I approve payments, watch the numbers, and know where the money goes. And when you start looking at it from that perspective, it starts making sense.

We started with a ton of equipment (servers, NAS', SAN's, firewalls, tape back-ups, RAIDs, etc.) that we had to buy and then we co-lo'd it in a third party data center, where we paid "rent" on a rack. With a hardware investment in the six figures, not to mention rack charges, a cloud environment can make sense, especially if you have large storage requirements.

So the moral of this very short story is run the numbers to fully understand the true costs of running on your own equipment (and don't forget to factor in equipment replacement every few years, maintenance, spare parts, internal charge backs, more storage, etc.) vs. the costs of cloud computing. You just might be surprised.

Posted by Patrick Campbell at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of talk about "The Cloud" these days. The funny thing about it is that it's not new - just the name is. I asked our CTO to define the cloud once and he came up with a very concise definition: "Something that doesn't run on your server."

If you use that definition (which I like) our marketing project management solution RoboHead has been in "the cloud" from a user's perspective since we launched it in 2004. Now at that time it was co-located, meaning it resided in a data center and was running on servers that we owned and maintained, but technically it was "in the cloud" (just without the sexy name).

And then there's what I would call the "true" cloud, where the solutions are hosted from a service like Amazon Web Services where you basically "pay to play" and don't own anything. That's where we now host RoboHead, as well as our digital asset management solution MajorTom, and our review and approval solution, ReviewPad.

So why the move to the cloud? Stay tuned for the next post.

Posted by Patrick Campbell at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back when I first entered the SaaS (Software as a Service) space back in 2004 (hence the "getting old" feeling) we really had to sell the concept of SaaS. It was new, people sort of got it, but we had tons of objections (mostly from IT) regarding security, DR (disaster recovery), where the data was located (someplace reputable or was it a server in someone's closet). We countered the objections, but it was a tough sell.

It's funny that in just a few years, SaaS has become not only accepted, but very mainstream. We rarely/never have to sell the concept. While we still may have to occasionally give some details on the infrastructure or answer some IT questionnaires, it's one out of twenty deals at the most. And not eight (or nine!) out of ten like it was in the early days.

Posted by Patrick Campbell at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)