3 ways to make the cloud work for your accountancy firm

Picture credit: Philip Brewer/Flickr

Your firm’s success is tied to the satisfaction of your clients. Providing the best financial services, regardless of the location or time, is possible with the cloud. The main attraction to the cloud is the fact that critical information can be stored securely and retrieved instantly.

Whether conducting a working lunch in a boardroom or reviewing files before a red-eye flight in an airport, data is easily accessible when you need it most. This aspect of the cloud eliminates geographical obstacles and time constraints enabling CPA firms to assist clients anytime, anywhere.

Accountants’ greatest responsibilities are preparing, examining and analyzing clients’ sensitive accounting records. Interpreting the minutiae of financial statements is labour intensive, so any hardware or software issues a company may endure is counterproductive.

Time is money for all parties. Firms employing a cloud solution can focus on their main task, while service providers take care of troubleshooting and maintenance necessary to keep everything running smoothly.  

Making the decision to migrate to the cloud is a huge undertaking for any CPA firm. When your firm decides the cloud is right for you, the following three tips must be examined to guarantee the effectiveness of your desired cloud solution.

  1. Make sure the cloud service provider understands your needs. Your firm has its own unique needs and challenges. In order to find the solution that helps you meet established business goals, a potential service provider must listen to and comprehend your firms’ main objectives and capabilities.
  2. Your cloud solution should be customized. Your firm is different from the countless number of other firms around the nation, so why should the cloud solution be the same for every firm? A “one-size-fits-all” cloud model won’t fit the needs of every firm, so a carefully-crafted, customized cloud solution tailored to your firm will help to ensure a high-level of productivity and improve overall efficiency.
  3. The service provider must keep you up-to-date. While you and your staff focus on client needs, your cloud provider should be focusing on the maintenance of the technological advancements that help your firm become more efficient. Your service provider should act as an outsourced IT team and have a finger on the pulse of the current trends in cloud computing. This will help to ensure your firm’s cloud service is the most advanced, effective solution available.

Choosing a cloud provider is a complex decision that takes time. Selecting the right provider will allow your firm to direct its attention to billable hours, increase productivity and produce desired results. Considering the number of potential cloud providers in the marketplace, it’s important for CPA firms to do their due diligence when selecting a service provider.

Put yourself in your clients’ shoes. Do you want a service provider that you can trust with your firm’s critical data? Your answer should help you make an informed decision when choosing the service provider that fits your firm’s needs.

Let’s go round again: Google unleashes new price cuts for Compute Engine

Picture credit: Robert Scoble/Flickr

Google has announced the latest price drop on its Compute Engine cloud infrastructure, keeping in line with its Moore’s Law theory of cloud pricing.

“As predicted by Moore’s Law, we can now lower prices again”, wrote Urs Hölzle, Google SVP technical infrastructure in a company blog post. “Effective immediately, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine by approximately 10% for all instance types in every region.

“These cuts are a result of increased efficiency in our data centres as well as failing hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers,” he added.

The latest price drops are likely to set off similar attacks from the competition, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Back in March Google set things off by slashing costs on Compute Engine, dropped by a third, and a two thirds drop for Cloud Storage, with Hölzle saying at the time you needed a PhD to work out the best option.

Amazon and Microsoft swiftly followed suit. At AWS Summits in San Francisco, SVP Andy Jassy noted that lowering prices was not new for Amazon, although admitting previous price drops came largely in the absence of competitive pressure.

Low prices don’t mean anything unless you’ve got customer support, mind you, and Google also took the time to focus on a couple of case studies. The Snapchat case study got wheeled out again – the search giant is fond of telling anyone who would listen about that – while two more interesting customers got mentions. Google Compute Engine powers Workiva, which processes financial reports for 60% of the Fortune 500 saving nearly $1m annually, and Coca Cola, running the Happiness Flag campaign for the World Cup.

Last month Google announced a scheme for $100,000 (£61,500) in Cloud Platform credits to eligible startups, again seemingly taking a shot across the bows of AWS and its Portfolio Package initiative.

 You can find out more about the latest cuts here. How will this influence your usage?

Think Like an Agile Architect By @TheEbizWizard | @CloudExpo

The big picture is building a culture of innovation. Changing our organizations so fundamentally, however, is inherently risky. Innovation requires disruption, and thus companies risk devolving into chaos as they follow the path to innovativeness.

But good executives (the ones who think like agile architects, of course) realize that there is a difference between chaos and the loosely-managed, self-organizing teams that deal well with change on an ongoing basis. Yes, the behavior of such teams is inherently unpredictable and may appear chaotic, but in reality such a culture is madness with a method, leading to innovation and greater agility. In contrast, true chaos has no pattern and leads only to more chaos.

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Are We Moving Towards A Software-Suite-As-A-Service Future? | @CloudExpo

Cloud computing has often been heralded as a revolutionary new technology that has not only brought down the cost of doing business but has also made it easy for aspiring entrepreneurs to launch new businesses with little overhead. Given the lower barriers to entry, it is possible for a newcomer to take on an established SaaS service with lesser effort today than it might have taken them to compete against the likes of Oracle and IBM in the earlier decades.

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So You Want to be a Cloud Architect? Part I

Cloud ArchitectLately, I’ve been taking a look at the role of a cloud architect. What does that role look like? How does one acquire the necessary skills? Where do aspiring cloud architects turn for training? Is it possible to acquire the skills to be an effective cloud architect by taking a course or two? Rick Blaisdell wrote a great blog about a month ago called “Top Cloud Skills Employers are Looking For” that I would highly recommend reading.

Cloud Architect Training, Today

I recently wrote a blog about a Forbes article I read by Jason Bloomberg about the concept of cloudwashing. I think this idea applies very well to the cloud training offerings out there today. If you take a look, many of the cloud training courses that currently exist from established vendors are simply rebranded with “Cloud” as a highlight.

The Valuable Cloud Architect

The cloud architect should possess a healthy combination of the following skills:

  • Technical –especially virtualization with a splash of programming and automation
  • IT operations – in particular the concept of IT services and an IT services portfolio
  • Understanding of your business, its initiatives, its challenges, etc.

Technical Skills of the Cloud Architect

Technically speaking, cloud architects need to bring their past experience to bear, validated by the following certifications:

  • Current VCP
  • ITIL v3 Foundations
  • At least one vendor certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solution Architect)
  • Basic knowledge of programming and automation(2)

Technical competence is more of a pre-requisite for a cloud architect. It should be assumed that a cloud architect has some hands-on experience with these items. As they say, these technical skills are necessary but not sufficient for the complete cloud architect. Having acquired these certifications, an architect would probably be hip to the recent progression of IT that occurred since virtualization became mainstream. If you’ve read this far, you’d probably agree that virtualization alone does not mean cloud computing. However, many of the fundamental characteristics of cloud borrow from virtualization and are practical due to virtualization.

Other Core Skills of the Cloud Architect

Maybe the role of the cloud architect is less technical than we think. Business and market knowledge is absolutely critical for the cloud architect, for several reasons:

  1. Products, features, and prices are changing day to day in the market for cloud services – why is this happening and what will happen tomorrow?
  2. The traditional corporate IT market is, effectively, now a competitor in this market for IT services
  3. Using cloud concepts, new companies are being formed and are growing rapidly – some of these companies may challenge your own business – how can the cloud architect understand them and improve their company’s competitive advantage, recognize partnership opportunities, bring products to market more rapidly using cloud and other emerging technology?

 

The third point is a bit of a departure from what we’ve seen as a cloud architect. This says that a cloud architect should really be a specialist in business issues. More than that, we think that Corporate IT should look to transform to specialize in the business rather than specialize in providing IT services. IT departments should be an Innovation Center for the business. More on that in a future post.

The market for cloud computing is changing every day. Established providers like Amazon Web Services introduce new features and products while also dropping prices. Established companies like Microsoft up their game quickly. New companies form to carve out a niche or challenge an established provider. Barriers to entry are low. Economists call this an active competitive marketplace. What does this mean for consumers? Consumers enjoy significant downward pressure on prices for cloud services (especially for commodity IaaS). This also means many new products from which to choose. For this reason, we think the modern cloud architect also needs to have some knowledge of the following:

  • Consulting Experience (particularly, how to assess an organization)
  • Relationships Between the Customer and Provider(1)
  • Essentials of Behavior in a Competitive Market(1) – specialization, substitutes, complements, network effects

I’ve seen a few posts lately suggesting that individuals in corporate IT need to retool. Here is one of those posts. I definitely agree with the author that IT administrators need to shift focus to services rather than servers. What this post leaves out is a recommendation of which new skills are needed. Which skills or certifications should an IT administrator or architect acquire? How do they get them? Later in this series, I’ll propose a training path for the new role of Cloud Architect, why certain skills are important, and how to acquire them.

For Part II, I’ll propose three different types of cloud architect, outline the responsibilities that individuals in this role might have, and describe a path to obtain the skills needed to deliver in this new role. Leave a comment below with your thoughts & stay tuned for part II.

 

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Photo credit = http://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbench/2011/10/what-they-didnt-ask/

Egnyte EMEA chief Ian McEwan: On customer demand, channel strategy and challenges

Picture credit: Egnyte

Feature Enterprise file sharing provider Egnyte has hired Ian McEwan to head up its nascent EMEA operation – and after a “hectic” first five weeks, the former Gigamon sales VP and founder member of the Cloud Industry Forum is rolling up his sleeves and getting on with the challenge.

Egnyte’s proposition is straightforward. The company tailors itself as being ‘built from the cloud down’. In other words, you need a hybrid mix of cloud and on-premise for enterprise to store and share files securely. Chief exec and co-founder Vineet Jain is such a firm believer in this his Twitter handle is @CloudNotEnough.

McEwan certainly fits the bill in terms of buying into the company ethos. In a previous role at FrontRange Solutions, competing against the likes of ServiceNow and BMC in service management, the European strategy revolved around a hybrid approach. “We made some very big inroads to some customers,” he notes.

Not needing to learn the ropes this time around, the strategy for Egnyte is to continue where FrontRange left off.

“From my perspective, the marketplace and the number of vendors in that space will start to consolidate, and it’ll be interesting to see what the customer is driving from their demands,” McEwan tells CloudTech. “You look at some of the vendors, they’ve got very large market penetration, but a lot of that is on a zero cost to the consumer, which is very hard to sustain when you have to keep continually investing in R&D.”

As McEwan notes, it’s a pretty crowded marketplace. With 19 vendors on the latest Gartner enterprise file synchronisation and share (EFSS) Magic Quadrant, it represents an industry sector with many fingers in many pies. You’ve got your cloud storage players in Box and Dropbox, your hyper vendors in Google, Microsoft and IBM, and enterprise mobility companies in AirWatch.

A lot of companies forgot about the most important words in front of reseller – the value add

Egynte is positioned at the very high end of the niche players category at bottom left. At the time Gartner noted Egynte’s strengths in being 100% enterprise-focused and openness to partnership, but cited two key weaknesses; unproven on-premises model and – you guessed it – a lack of investment in Europe.

McEwan explains that the whole of EMEA is fair game, although the most interest for Egnyte’s solutions for now is in the Middle East, Nordics and Benelux. In other words, Egnyte “probably” won’t be following the standard roadmap of American software companies wanting to get a foothold across the Atlantic, targeting the UK, then Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and so on.

“In a way I’m saying we’re going to go after the market from an EMEA perspective, but if I drill down on that a little bit, I’m probably going to focus on some of our key verticals, where we’re finding our hybrid approach resonates very well with the business and IT,” McEwan says.

“That’s construction, retail, manufacturing, and to be honest it’s anywhere people are sending large amounts of data, and they want to do it in a controlled environment.

“We’re not going to be bound by country, but we’re going to focus on what we do well and execute against that,” he adds.

McEwan is under no illusions of the board’s expectations; “certainly high double digit…if not three digit” year on year growth, he says. There’s plenty of slack from the board, but not too much; he adds that he’s in regular contact with the board and CEO Jain, but has autonomy to “put his footprint and signature to the growth of the company.”

For now, the company appears in no big hurry to do anything as drastic as going public. When Jain spoke to CloudTech back in April to announce European expansion, he described a “little slow and deliberate” style of leadership, in stark contrast to some of Egnyte’s competitors.

Nowhere was this more exemplified than when Jain refused the board’s request to open up a European branch last year. “You need to strengthen into a specific territory before you go and fight another war,” he said.

For McEwan, who went through an IPO with Gigamon, it’s a similar route.

“I would rather focus on where we’re going to really grow and develop, and put the investment there, and go to the board with investment requests based on business models, rather than getting bodies and heads into an organisation and then finding we don’t have a strategy to support that,” he explains.

“You just have to look at some of the S-1 filings that are out there, or companies about to go IPO. It’s got to be a balanced scorecard, it’s got to show the growth, it’s got to show international growth, but it’s also got to balance up the cost versus the revenues – and there are some companies out there burning multi-million dollar payments that came in from the VCs on a monthly basis.”

One of the keys McEwan frequently pointed out is to beef up both the direct sales strategy and indirect sales through the channel. As he puts it, it’s about getting the balance right.

“Ultimately it’s going to be a customer’s decision in which way he wants to go, and nine times out of 10 it’s not just a commercial decision”, says McEwan. “It’s not a sales guy from the vendor saying ‘come with us directly and we’ll give you an extra 10% off.’

McEwan is under no illusions of the board’s expectations; “certainly high double digit, if not three digit” year on year growth

“I think for a long period of time a lot of companies forgot about the most important words in front of reseller…the value add,” he adds. “From a European perspective we know what our target markets are going to be, and we know that complementing some current technology vendors will help us grow, and will help their partner community to stave off some competitive threats from other vendors.”

This includes storage partners and cloud-based security partners, McEwan confirmed. It all goes back to Gartner’s strengths for Egnyte in EFSS: “open to partnering where it does not have to skills in-house.” It’s certainly something some vendors could learn from.

The immediate future for Egnyte in Europe involves several key hires, building up the new European headquarters in Stockley Park, in Heathrow, and then planning for next year.

As the oft-repeated, rarely-learned story of oligarch sports teams goes, a glut of great players at gratuitous expense in one go rarely gels. It’s very similar in business. To that end, McEwan will be overseeing an onboarding process, getting two key US employees across the pond to oversee things for up to two years.

“It’s going to be a controlled and steady growth, but I’m also very conscious that this window is getting smaller and smaller from an opportunity perspective,” he adds. “Every day that’s gone by that we haven’t been able to promote our position is an opportunity that’s gone by the wayside for at least the limited term of the contract with the competitors.

“But we are finding we’re having lots of conversations with customers who would have traditionally or initially gone with one of the other vendors, but started to realise some of the business or technology limitations. We’re finding a bit of interest coming from what I would call second generation clients, who have already put the foot into a file sync and share company.

“I think it’s going to be a steady growth, but steady growth is something that can be measured in doing a couple of things right, and that’s focusing on the customer, getting the right channel strategy, and fulfilling those requirements.”