Continuing our look at cloud computing through the eyes of the end user — Cloudtopia talks with one of Singapore’s top decision makers, Jason Chin, Chief Strategy Officer of the Helutrans Group.

Nathan Statz:

What cloud computing technology does your business utilise?

Jason Chin:

We are now actually using Salesforce.com, so we use the system for a number of CRM related processes, which are for front and back office. We use them as well in terms of tracking for all of our shipments. And we have a few projects that are ongoing to increase the level of integration across our departments and divisions of business. That’s what we have with Salesforce.com.

Now if we talk about cloud computing, we are also exploring to basically make some changes to our IT infrastructure. We are trying to move to a very cloud-centric (model) and now we are in a process of evaluating a cloud vendor to host all of our email and messaging services. We are doing quite a number of things that is related to cloud.

Nathan:

What difference has the adoption of that technology made in terms of cost savings and productivity?

Jason:

Well i think that when it comes to cost savings — when you have a savings benefit here you end up paying elsewhere, I think the biggest benefit is that you are able to see your cost structure and cost components more clearly. With a cloud vendor you can break it into per-user license, so every time you have a new headcount you can see what kind of expense as compared to the old-school on-premis.

You end up with a heavy investment and you have to monetise over X number of years, so its less clear and you constantly have to make a decision. Then you have to try to guess what your capacity is and with cloud nowadays you can actually scale up or down very easily — i think that is a major benefit.

Nathan:

What challenges did you have to overcome when you made the jump to the cloud?

Jason:

Of course, and i believe a lot of our peers have faced the same challenges and i think one of the biggest challenges was to overcome the concept that when you don’t host your data on-premis, its a security issue. This is — i think — the first one that most people encounter and same for us. We spent quite a lot of time trying to understand how security is being maintained with our cloud vendors and we want to only work with cloud vendors who have a good reputation and a safe system and Salesforce.com is one of them.

Nathan:

Was there any reluctance inside your organisation before moving to cloud-based operations?

Jason:

I think the kind of reluctance that we encounter is not so much related to cloud or non-cloud, its more of a technology perspective. I say that because in our business there is quite a significantly large number of users that are of a certain age group and above, and naturally they are not as tech-savvy as the younger generation. This are the kind of people who — over a number of years — they start getting into Facebook so they are not comfortable dealing with a computer.

So i think this is the challenge that we face, whether it is cloud or non-cloud i think is pretty transparent to them.

Nathan:

What aspects of cloud technology do you believe could use some improvement?

Jason:

Well, i think that one of these things that the market can do to close the expectation gap is to be very clear on what is really a cloud and what is semi-cloud. (There are) new players in the market that are trying to market solutions that look like cloud, but really it isn’t cloud and these are the kind of things that are sending a lot of mixed signals to perspective buyers. When you go for a cloud solution, technically the infrasturcture should be multi-tenanted and have all the economies of scale.

A lot of smaller time players, even in Singapore, are basically trying to sell you a hosted solution, but you still end up buying your own dedicated server so that is not a real cloud per se. There is a fine line and i think that with digital technology, the decision makers need to discern what they are buying and that is going to be really important.

Nathan:

Was there much re-training or change management needed when you made the transition to cloud-based services?

Jason:

I think the retraining aspect is more of in terms of understanding conceptually what a cloud is about. It used to be where we used a CRM system, as well, but its local area network based so you have to be in the office to do this and that and now with a lot of cloud solutions there is high availability of data and you can work from anywhere. You can go down to Starbucks and work from there.

I think the kind of retraining we are going through is more in terms of management retraining. Managers, especially senior managers that are up there in age, they need to understand its not about seeing your employees working, you’ve got to be looking at what kind of end result we get out of it and you look at logins instead of looking at who is in the office. Its more on the bigger picture side of things, not so much on user being able to use the appllcation.

Look at Twitter and Facebook today, you don’t need any kind of training to use Facebook at all, so i think a lot of cloud applications are already (heading) in that direction and i don’t think that is going to change. In terms of user training that is a really small part, its more in terms of the management of concepts.

Nathan:

Do you believe that your foray into the cloud computing world lived up to the hype?

Jason:

Yes of course, i think we are very satisfied with the kind of system that we have today. One of the major advantages that we have faced is that the mobility is unparalleled and being able to deploy across the globe is very important for us. If you look back 5 or 8 years ago, and you are on a traditional in-house based CRM or ERP solution, you always require very expensive hardware to always do your virtual private network (VPN) connections. secure VPN for your mobile clients and with cloud computing all this has become something of the yesteryear, so i think we are happy with what cloud has given us so far. I think it is here to stay and we are very excited to see how we can integrate new aspects of our business to embrace cloud computing.

You can dissect and analyse a technology down to the tiniest detail, but unless you actually get your hands dirty you will never truly understand the software space. Which is why Cloudtopia had a chat with Sumeet Vaid, founder and CEO of Ffreedom Financial Partners in India — to find out how cloud computing is making a difference to daily business life.

Nathan Statz

What cloud computing technology does your business utilise?

Sumeet Vaid:

In india it is almost negligible in terms of the presence itself, it doesn’t happen the way it does in New Zealand, Australia and some of the other developed markets.

For this kind of a process, for what we are trying to do, we needed a strong technology platform which will do complete customer lifecycle management. This is not about CRM, rather its about customer life cycle management.

(What we have is) equivalent to hosting the complete business on the cloud. The cloud solution that we are using today is a combination of Force.com from Salesforce.com and (we also use) Google.

Nathan:

What difference has the adoption of that technology made in terms of cost savings and productivity for your business?

Sumeet:

A huge difference, we chartered over a year back and today we have close to 24 members. For us, what cloud did is it has converted our capital expenditure into operational expenditure. It’s great you know — from a startup point of view — as i am not investing up front. I’m not trying to go and invest huge into technology. What we have done is we have created a 3 member technology team which is trained on cloud both with Force.com and Google itself. What we are realising about cloud is it is not about coding, its about clicks. And that is very empowering.

Nathan:

Were there any challenges you had to overcome when you first made the jump into cloud services?

Sumeet:

No nothing — no challenges. In fact every day we are experiencing a bliss in terms of the cloud because our time-to-market is so much less. I’ll tell you the reason why we delayed this phone call for 30 minutes is that we were launching a new reward system for our team members and we called it Morale. This is based on the process that we are following in the organisation and at every step of the process we give a certain number of points.

This is because of our belief that we should not remunerate the outcome but we should remunerate the process — because the outcome is always a part of a process and we have developed a hosted on-our-cloud computing (option) with the Salesforce.com platform that we are using currently. Each employee will be able to see a dashboard of their points on their screen. We did a flat one (this) week. In effect we could of gone to any other technology vendor and they would of asked us for 2 months of specifying and a larger amount of money with a minimum 6 months of time-to-market and we did it in a weekend.

We always say why does nobody else uses this.

Nathan:

What about when you first started using cloud services, was there any reluctance in your organisation to switch across to cloud technology.

Sumeet:

No, nothing, being a start-up and as a MD/CEO my conviction was very clear since day zero. What we did is put the cloud application in the centre and created a business around it. Our current application is being housed on Force.com platform. And we have branded it our own name and its an IT which we are branding ourselves and our products as part of using the cloud application. We live out of the cloud and we don’t see any challenges and we are even realising that the new features that Force.com are lodging are very exciting. For instance Chatter is almost like Facebook — we don’t internally use mail.

Nathan:

So you have everyone in your organisation using Chatter?

Sumeet:

Yes.

Nathan:

And how long have they been using Chatter for?

Sumeet:

We were involved in the beta for Chatter, so you can say that almost the day it was launched within the Salesforce.com environment, for even commercially we had been using and we had been experiencing it so we are eagerly awaiting Chatter 2.

It’s like an internal Facebook.

Nathan:

What difference has that made having the internal Facebook — having Chatter — available to all of your employees?

Sumeet:

We are a young team. Now the way we are seeing the environment — you know walking around — and more so in India, myself along with 2 more colleagues of mine have a total experience of 16 years plus, but otherwise everyone else is young. Now they are young and living in a Facebook environment, as soon as you give them an application like Chatter that is a Facebook-like application, they pick it up immediately. The second benefit is that its real-time, unlike email where you send mail and if you receive it you open, read and stuff like this — its real time. And it’s funky, so all these things get adaptability very quick, and the beauty of Chatter is that because it is based on the same platform as what we are working on, so it has all the data and everything, so we can use it on anything.

We are currently chatting on fan mail, we are currently chatting on leads, opportunities or entities and stuff like this, we are eagerly awaiting when we can implement chatter into the dashboard. We are tracking where our dashboard in terms of clients and in terms of hey, how’s it going, how many more clients this month will come.

It’s fun!

Nathan:

Just looking on the other side of it though, do you think there any aspects of cloud technology that could use a little improvement? Are there any features you would like to see expanded?

Sumeet:

Yes, i think we need to continue to evolve this much more. For example cloud technology should become more portable. Currently we are building an application on Force.com platform which should have an ability to port-ably move this to another platform. Lets say tomorrow there is something else, lets say Google, comes up with a much better platform and we want to move from Force.com to Google, so the portability should be very good and take care of the concerns that we might have with the specific platforms. The second point would be trying to integrate a lot of people much better on cloud. What we feel currently is the lack of understanding of cloud as a technology, especially in India, and then in terms of global.

If you go to somebody and say you are working on a cloud, you get concerned with that. Whereas our feeling is cloud — from a technology point of view — is so advanced that up untill now a small business could never have afforded it. (For instance) 99.99% uptime would of been impossible for me to offer on a server that you have installed and put an Oracle database on our servers. Or for that matter ISO 27001 from a data security point of view. For a small operator, in this aspect, ISO 27001 would be just impossible. We feel that because we are in cloud its much more advantageous, where as a lot of markets that do not understand cloud and its not active, so its much faster to do it on our own.

Nathan:

Just speaking generally do you feel that your experiences with cloud computing have lived up to the hype surrounding the technology before you got involved with it?

Sumeet:

In fact its improving with every day. We never thought all these things are possible in the cloud when we started off, but with every passing day it has just opened up. It’s very very different to what we expected beyond what we expected actually.

Nathan:

Anything else you would like to add about cloud in general?

Sumeet:

Yes, we are also using the same platform on our mobile smartphones, blackberries etc. I think that is kind of evolutionary especially in India where internet and mobile penetration are improving at a rapid pace. I think 2-3 years down the line we will see these things that we are doing right now to be a huge advantage. It will help us go and beat the big daddies like Citibank, Bank of America etc, because they are using the same technology.

It’s almost like democratisation of technology, its no longer a differentiating factor. The technology platform we are using may be used by the largest of the large, the differences then lies in how quick you can think, how good you can think and how you can implement it. It’s a great time.

It was a packed house at IDC’s cloud computing conference at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. Overlooking the Australian version of Hyde Park, scores of C-level executives enjoyed finger food and endless cups of strong coffee before trudging off to a keynote speech by Chris Morris, IDC’s cloud computing guru for the Asia Pacific region.

Morris’ oratory was clearly well rehearsed, so much so that he even referred to the fact he has given the talk in several different countries. Having been to dozens of these types of events over the years, it was a note-worthy moment to see that nobodies eyes glazed over when the definition of cloud computing was raised.

One of the big attention-grabbing statements to come from Morris’ address, was the idea that we have seen the peak of email usage, with the future going to be focused on the rise of collaborative platforms.

This type of rhetoric isn’t all that new, The Wall Street Journal prophesized it in 2009,and many others then had a stab at the concept, including Gizmodo.

Though there is a compelling argument to be made that many users prefer social networks and instant messaging, and really only utilize email because they have too, particularly in younger generations.

The conference ticked along at a steady rate, with speakers from various cloud computing vendors as well as a case study presented by Karen Holt, head of information services at the National Maritime Museum. Holt’s presentation was extremely well-received, particularly as she joined the panel for the question and answer (Q&A) session at the tail end of the conference.

The Q&A panel at IDC’s Cloud Computing Conference 2010

Though you couldn’t be sure if the room was still packed to capacity due to the prize draw being held at the end (not that conference organizers delay them to keep people around, right?), the enthusiasm level was still kicking during the Q&A panel.

Dean Nash — a BizAcademy participant — talks about some of the more colourful elements of the program.

One of the perks of writing for a blog sponsored by Salesforce.com is that when a fancy soiree is being held, there’s a chance we get to attend. Such was the case when Baia restaraunt — overlooking the water on Cockle Bay Wharf — played host to the Biz Academy dinner.

On this occasion I had the usual mild concern that I would be in the quietest section of the table surrounded by socially awkward people who were only interested in staring at their entree. That thought was dashed the moment I arrived — admittedly after more than a couple of fashionably late minutes — when there was impromptu speeches, cheering, clapping and a non-stop whirlwind of conversation, all before I even had a chance to take my seat.

The function was the final stop in a week-long journey for Biz Academy cadets. The program is run for underprivileged youths working with Mission Australia and put together by the Salesforce.com Foundation. The aim of the initiative is to give hands-on business training and experience to those who may normally find it difficult to access.

I was squeezed into a seat next to Jeffrey Choi, who had just gone through the ropes of the Biz Academy program and told me it was at times grueling, amazing and lots of fun. In a moment of startling honesty, Choi also told me that a week ago he would of had trouble having this conversation with me (the bubbly public relations people had already outed me as a Cloudtopia blogger) but thanks to a week in the program he had gained renewed confidence.

Call me skeptical, but it did not seem likely that 1 week was enough time to give anyone a significant self-confidence boost and I said as much — thanks largely to the free-flowing vino. One of Choi’s team members, Dean Nash, leapt to his comrades defence and also pointed that he too had gained in confidence as a result of the week’s adventures.

The reason for this is how intense and well-managed the entire event was. Participants were sent through an interview process — like they would if they were applying for a job — before the program began. From there they were treated as consultants for the remainder of the exercise, with the goal of assessing the carbon footprint of the Salesforce.com Sydney office and how to reduce it.

Upon arrival on day one, the cadets were sorted into groups of four and then sent into a recording studio to cut a hip-hop album onto CD. No I didn’t make that up, the first activity — usually a classic ice breaker like throwing a ball around and asking everyone their name — was to work together to make a rap compilation.

Afterwards the groups were taken through a series of investigative challenges, often interviewing Salesforce.com’s staff to gather real data on the office’s carbon output. Choi points out that they were treated as real consultants and given training in report preparation, presentation and management.

Nash was actually so successful that he was invited back for a 1 month internship with Salesforce.com, which was quite a feat given there was only a single place offered and he was competing with a room packed full of enthusiastic attendees.

You could of powered several small neighbourhoods with the energy that was in the room that night, it was high-voltage stuff. The farewell process was long and drawn out and really brought home how close the volunteers, participants and Salesforce.com staff members had come in just one week.

I have been witness to many keynote speeches in my time, especially those which were moonlighting as product announcements, though few had the same sheer stage presence of Salesforce.com’s CEO and Chairman – Marc Benioff at Cloudforce London.

Speaking at the Royal Festival Hall, Benioff bounded on stage to the sounds of I’ve Got a Feeling by the Black Eyed Pees and captured every ones attention through the sheer force of his charisma. Now the speech might not quite of had the manic enthusiasm of Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer’s infamous developers chant but my attention was riveted and I wasn’t even there.

That is because the entire event was streamed live over the internet right next to a Twitter feed with all posts mentioning the #cloudforce hashtag.

Benioff was quick to point out that his first foray into the United Kingdom didn’t have quite as many attentive listeners. “The first time I came to London, I didn’t get to play festival hall — I think there were about 4 people who showed up, 2 of those were lost and the other 2 only came for the free food.”

The phenom CEO also voiced his surprise that one of the company’s customers in London was still using Lotus Notes – a technology that Benioff explains was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was.

The event doubled as the launch site for Chatter Mobile, which is a real-time enterprise collboration application and platform. The technology leverages social features made popular by sites like Facebook and Twitter, with more focus on collaborative sales applications and less on Farmville. Salesforce.com actually launched Chatter back in June and today’s announcement is about taking this technology mobile.

“Chatter Mobile means you can know what is happening in your entire enterprise, wherever you are,” says Benioff. “The combination of devices like the iPad or the new iPod touch with mobile apps like Chatter that push information to you in real-time are making the desktop obsolete.”

The technology is aptly-timed, considering that almost every piece of mobile kit walking out stores today is internet-equipped and IDC has 2010 pegged as the year the world surpasses 1 billion mobile workers.

Matthew Schafer, founding partner of Sequoia Wealth Management group believes that deploying Salesforce Chatter has transformed the way his organization works.

“Now, with Chatter Mobile, employees will be liberated from desktop computing and able to stay actively involved with important information through a simple interface on their mobile device. This will be huge for our productivity,” he says.

The announcement under the shade of Big Ben comes at a time when cloud computing is receiving more attention and scrutiny than ever before. Particularly as the US Government sends it’s oversight committee to glance over the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative.

“Enterprises are embracing social apps and mobile computing as their future,” said R “Ray” Wang, founding partner and analyst from Altimeter Group. “Customers shouldn’t ever worry about where or how their social apps are deployed and accessed.”

Chatter Mobile will be available at no additional charge for Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers. Apps for BlackBerrys and Apple devices using the new service are slated to be available in late 2010, with Android devices being supported in the first half of 2011.

Image credit: Stefano Brivio//Flickr, royalty free

A few months back, I was engaged in a very insightful CIO round table in Australia discussing with over a dozen industry executives how the state of IT has been changed forever. High on the agenda was a chat about the rise of cloud computing as in the face of a new IT reality where organisations must be prepared to do more with less — and better — than ever before.

The most exciting thing — from my perspective — to come from these discussions was the dawning realization that a public cloud computing solution delivers the highest common denominator of benefits.

Now I am not talking about math fractions — I am speaking of the direct opposite of the common phrase ‘lowest common denominator.’ When you think about it, a customer’s solution is only as good as its current status and suffers from the limitations of that release — until such time as money is spent to upgrade or patch it.

The highest common denominator is the concept that all consumers of a technology will automatically receive the benefit of every enhancement automatically — offering new opportunities to do more — while driving down cost through improved rationalization and capabilities. This directly applies to true, multi-tenant, public cloud computing solutions.

Let’s take a quick pause to define multi-tenancy, because it’s an important part of this concept. It is in essence the rigorous application of shared infrastructure and software services across multiple tenants or customers.

I like to use the analogy of a large modern office building, filled with many different tenants, who all share common infrastructure such as elevators, security, and fire-proofing, but will all have customized their offices in different ways.

A single-tenant system (which also defines most ‘private’ cloud offerings), is a situation where every tenant has their own office building and share nothing.

In the multi-tenant office building, improvements such as shiny new tiles for the pool or an upgraded alarm system are immediately available to all occupants. In a single tenant building, improvements can only be realized by one resident.

The same theory applies to an enterprise cloud, where all customers gain immediate access to the benefits throughout the entire life-cycle of ownership. In essence — with multi-tenancy — you get the highest common denominator; with single tenancy, you get the lowest.

During our talks, the panel of CIOs found there were a number of dimensions that were important about the highest common denominator in enabling future success:

1 – Quality

This one came as an epiphany to the entire group — myself included. Google and Salesforce.com were both stated as examples where minor issues were identified and solved permanently, for every user, in minutes. As opposed to legacy on-premise issues that could only be fixed through patching — which can take a significantly longer time and never reaches everyone.

2 – Security

Always a point of marked debate for IT decision makers, the discussion here resulted in a revelation for some and a confirmation for others. In simple terms, the highest common denominator of security means that all customers automatically enjoy the cumulative features and robustness of security from every customer audit, penetration test, or enhanced feature delivered to meet the most rigorous requirements.

For example, if a multi-tenant cloud offering has received SAS70 Type II or ISO:27001 certification, every customer receives its benefit; the same for features like global secure workstations, VPNs, 128 bit encryption, SSO, SOX compliance, auditing, field security, ip range restrictions, etc.

The misconception about the lack of security for co-mingled data from different organizations in a multi-tenant cloud was also put to rest. Just as your bank, your telco, your government, and every vendor that you work with stores your data securely alongside that of other individuals, the multi-tenant system applies this same expertise, but with even more security mechanisms in place to ensure integrity.

3 – Integration

It was generally concluded that integration consumes an inordinate amount of CIO time and money. When examined through the highest common denominator of the cloud, integration capabilities once again looked positively game-changing. The minute that any integration mechanism, of any type or method, is proven against a rigorously published API that needs to meet the common standards of all of its customers, it is instantly available. The API must be standard, with backward compatibility, ensuring every past integration will not break, and enabling new protocols and methods for the future.

4 – Innovation

Everyone knew this was the case, but when viewed through the highest common denominator lens, the level of innovation almost caused a moment of awed silence. The beauty of this is that as cloud vendors grow — and customer demands along with it — the speed of innovation will only accelerate, providing even more advantages to those that take it seriously, and increase the danger to those choosing to stay in legacy IT cycles.

The list goes on…

The conversation spanned a number of other highest common denominator elements which I won’t go into here, but will mention for the record: deployment, flexibility, scalability, availability, performance, upgrades, and green computing. There are more yet to be discussed.

The CIO council was one of the most provocative and insightful events I have participated in a long time, and we all left the round table significantly more empowered with the concept of the highest common denominator. This concept is the proof point that cloud computing is the most important transformational IT trend in the future, which will enable IT organizations and business to achieve more with less — and better — in the times ahead.

Have you ever passed a homeless person in the street and tried to ignore that slightly guilty pang that ripples down your spine at their unfortunate plight? I have, particularly when passing people armed with carboard signs and McDonalds cups half full of loose change.

Despite the fact I do not reach into my pockets for the assorted beggars along Sydney’s iconic George Street, I still like to believe I am a good-natured individual and give where I can, particularly if I pass a vendor spruiking the latest edition of The Big Issue.

Quite a few years ago, I was delivering a soap-box style speech to my house mates about how the government should do more for those unfortunate people who are never sure where they were going to sleep that night. My oration was greeted with a few commiserating nods as we assured ourselves that our federal legislators needed to step up and deliver — though one dissenting voice belonging to my friend Andrew Geelen told me to put up or shut up, and outlined that if if everyone in Sydney donated one hour of their time per month we could practically wipe out homelessness. A bold claim and most likely not accurate, however it did inspire me to go put in a few hours at Teresa House where Mr Gheelan volunteered.

I lasted all of one month before I packed it in as being too hard.

What has this story got to do with technology? Or more specifically cloud computing (that is what this blog is for after all).

Well, the truth is I was blown away by the tale of Andrew Everingham (must be something about the name Andrew) who is the director for strategic assets at Salesforce.com Marketing, Asia Pacific.

Two years ago, Everingham was sent to a marketing conference in San Francisco where part of the activities was a ‘volunteering day’ that sent the assorted executives out into the sunshine to get their hands dirty.

The group which Everingham ended up with was sent out to a Homeless Connect event, where those without a roof to call their own are brought together in the same place as service providers that can help them out. This includes health care providers, social security officials, housing assistance officers as well as an abundance of clothes donations and a mighty cook-up.

“I really approached this event with a sense of blindness. Homeless people used to be made of glass to me — I was aware they were there but I would see straight through them,” he recalls.

“I turned up at the venue and it took about 15 minutes before the plight of homelessness sunk in.”

The spectacle so touched Everingham that he decided to bring the initiative back home to Sydney and reached out to the Mayor’s office, where Clover Moore was quick to come on board along with a number of other organizations.

Everingham realized quite early on that he wasn’t the pioneer he thought he was — Brisbane had actually run a Homeless Connect event as early as 2008.

Fast forward to June of this year and the home town of the coat-hanger bridge and the seashell opera house hosted it’s inaugural Homeless Connect event in the newly-renovated Town Hall.

Peter Durie (left) and Andrew Everingham (right) at Homeless Connect Sydney.

Though coy about whether he personally twisted any arms to make it so, Everingham explains that basically the entire Sydney office of SalesForce.com got involved with the running of the event, as well as a number of other organizations — including the basketball starlets from the Sydney Kings who dropped by.

“We had 60 organisations in one place, with over 300 volunteers and over 1,200 guests with donated products and services to the value of $250,000. We served over 1,000 sausages and 750 roast dinners,” explains Everingham.

While there are countless cases of companies doing good things to fulfil their corporate social responsibility charters — and they don’t always grab the media attention they deserve — this particular instance struck a chord with me because of the momentum coming from the business community teaming up with government organisations (though they may have been corralled into helping out by Sydney’s firebrand of a Mayor).

Lunch time in Town Hall.

It might not sound like much, but having to go through dozens of different departments — each with their own mountain of paperwork for you to fill out — can be a headache for anyone, esxpecially when the stakes are basic services that the rest of us take for granted. Having all of the organisations brought under one roof for homeless people to access is a good thing, particularly when they are referred to another department that is within pointing distance.

Top Image credit: James Fischer//Flickr, royalty free

When we launched Cloudtopia several months ago, its aim was simple — to cover Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce customer conference in Singapore. And the conference went off without a hitch, although there were some tired Salesforce.com staff afterwards — we particularly liked our photo of director of Platform Research Peter Coffee. It was a big week!

But what we found through the conference was that we started a conversation with Cloudtopia — a conversation around cloud computing. And once they’ve been started, conversations are not easy to stop.

So that’s why we’re going to keep that conversation rolling.

Starting today, Cloudtopia is going to continue publishing. We’re going to bring you the best stories — as well as podcasts and videos — about cloud computing from right around the Asia-Pacific region.

Of course, because the blog has been set up by Salesforce.com, it will continue to have a strong Salesforce.com focus. But it will also bring you stories about other cloud computing companies, and it won’t be full of press releases and marketing hype. We’re aiming to bring you stories about real people that are having their business changed in a positive way by cloud computing — as well as examining challenging issues that stand in the way towards its adoption.

We’re not going to look away from the hard stuff.

Firstly, let’s get some housekeeping out of the way. Who’s going to be writing this thing?

Allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Nathan Statz, and I’m a senior writer for LeMay & Galt Media, a company based out of Sydney and run by Renai LeMay, who helped launch Cloudtopia. We’re working with Salesforce.com on the blog, and I’ll be your guide through this conversation.

You can contact me by:

• Email: nathan@lemayandgalt.com
• Telephone: +612 8011 4376
• Twitter: @sephyre

So what have we been reading recently in order to start thinking about as we prepared for the rebirth of Cloudtopia?

For starters we’ve been thinking about that everpresent debate — the definition of cloud computing. Berkely’s Above the Cloud paper published in 2009 has been useful here, although the cheeky souls at Slashdot also had a stab :) Then we’ve been checking out the latest customer news — especially the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for cloud.

Anyway, that’s enough for us for now — stay tuned for more cloud coming over the next week and beyond!

Image credit: Jefferson Noguera, royalty free

We think this photo of Salesforce.com director of Platform Research Peter Coffee late yesterday says it all. Catch you next time!

I thought the best way to give a taste of the sorts of things that Benioff was talking about was to show you this short video clip of the CEO answering a question from a journalist at the press conference after the keynote.

In short, Benioff is an executive that likes change. His keynote speech this afternoon was full of examples of things Salesforce.com is doing to move its cloud computing vision forward. It’s all part of a vision the company is pushing to start describing the next wave of cloud services as “Cloud 2″.

I felt as if when Benioff first started off his speech, he was a little subdued. But after a few minutes, he really started to warm up as he talked about subjects that he obviously loves — and has spent his career pursuing.

For example, he demonstrated not only the company’s incoming Chatter platform — kind of a Yammer/Twitter on steroids for internal corporate information and communication — but also applications built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.

The executive shared the stage with customers and partners, calling them up one after the other to demonstrate their own solutions built on Force.com and talk about how they’re using Salesforce. One of the customers was Altium chief information officer Alan Perkins — you can see a video of an interview we did with him here.

One demonstration that particularly impressed me was a feature where a customer service agent could easily track customer complaints through Salesforce.com’s interaction with Twitter, and then resolve their complaint on Twitter.

It seems to me that this would be a much better and quicker way to resolve many customer complaints for companies, as opposed to the time-consuming telephone support options which are still popular.

“There is no ‘Press 1 for Customer Service’ on Twitter,” said Benioff during the keynote. But it seems like Salesforce.com’s solution might get around that.

However, the flipside to liking change is that Benioff also mentioned several times that he doesn’t like to see the IT industry reject change — and it seems like he believes some of Salesforce.com’s competitors are doing just that when it comes to cloud computing.

One thing I think the crowd appreciated during the keynote was that Benioff often cracked jokes about the competition. Holding up an Apple iPad, the executive said it was likely the fastest-growing computer in the market today “probably because it’s not from Microsoft”. “This is not a Microsoft tablet, because if we had one it wouldn’t work,” he added.

Later on he referred to “last-generation”contact centre solutions from Oracle, SAP, Amdocs, Siebel and Microsoft. And when the IT manager of Prudential Singapore said that the company had previously had issues with “old technology” before it adopted Salesforce.com, Benioff cracked: “Old Microsoft technology?”

However Benioff also had kind words for some Salesforce.com rivals.

Later on during the press conference, for example, Benioff referred to Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison as his mentor, and quoted extensively from Ellison’s book Softwar.

It’s clear that Benioff still has a great affection for Ellison — and that’s natural — for several decades he has known the Oracle leader, either as his boss or as the CEO of the biggest competitor to Salesforce.com

Yet it’s also clear that Benioff has found his own space and audience. The crowd at the Cloudforce keynote this afternoon clearly appreciated his presence, and some attendees were obviously very passionate about the flexibility that Salesforce.com’s solutions are offering their businesses.