I just returned from a conference (SoCal TiECon) in Long Beach, CA where I spoke on a panel on Cloud Computing.

When they first invited me to speak on the panel, I was a bit surprised given that my firm Nayamode is not necessarily a leader in Cloud computing.

On further reflection though, in a kind of aha moment, I realized that we actually have a fairly unique perspective on cloud computing and how it is changing business. Specifically:

• Nayamode works with customers that have strong offerings in the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure and SQL Azure. i.e. we are helping companies market their cloud offerings
• Nayamode also works with customers that want to specifically adopt solutions hosted in the cloud, some of which we’re building for customers such as Fluke Corporation today
• And finally, Nayamode has been developing and deploying several solutions over the last few years that are repeatedly requested by customers. We are moving these to a SaaS platform that can provide the same benefits to our customers in a low cost, scalable, secure and reliable way.

There is much hype around cloud computing today and we advise our customers to take advantage of this new mode of computing services by doing the following:

• Understand what the options are – from public, private to hybrid cloud offerings. This can be a confusing space and the right solution for you will depend on your business, size and maturity of operations
• Determine what the cloud can do for you specifically. Besides the obvious benefits of outsourcing your IT or related functions to experts, moving CapEx to OpEx budget items, getting massive scalability ‘on tap’ when required and in general, getting the ability to focus more of your IT budgets to true innovations rather than keeping the lights on, businesses can accrue less obvious benefits in terms of being able to change how they deliver their services and out-compete their rivals. A good example is Netflix, a company of significant size, strength and resources that choose to build their streaming video service on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) after finding that even their considerable in-house IT staff was unable to prevent outages at their datacenter. And as if to provide vindication of their decision, Netflix’s service didn’t suffer during the recent AWS outage which impacted other ‘tenants’ that hadn’t quite followed best practices when building their system on top of AWS.
• Once you know what to do and where to go for it, it’s time to try it out. Most businesses have been using cloud services forever. E.g. email or web hosting and more recently, payroll, CRM and HR services in the cloud offered by various providers. It’s time to determine what other non-core value adding services can be moved to the cloud. Or even if core and value adding (as in the video streaming for Netflix), is there a better 3rd party option that offers value, scale and reliability.

And if you ever need a suite of marketing services, Nayamode can help!