Tomorrow’s Forecast: Partly Cloudy

“Joe, will you join us in the small conference room please.” The voice on the other end of the intercom belonged to Sam Stevens, the owner of a small but prominent financial services firm. As Joe entered the room, he noticed several binders and folders containing financial reports, budgets, and other planning documents scattered on the conference room table. The room’s participants had been meeting for some time before he arrived. “Joe, thanks for joining us,” Sam said. “At least once a year I like to meet with people I trust to help plan our business strategy for the coming year. It’s especially important this year because the recent economic downturn is putting increasing pressure on us, making it critical for us to find new ways to cut costs and reduce inefficiencies. As our top account rep, your perspective and input is valuable to this process.”

Over the past 14 years Samantha Stevens had built a solid reputation for helping her clients realize their long-term financial goals. Through hard work and dedication she had developed a team of smart, dedicated employees, and built outstanding relationships with her clients and the business community at large. A sudden collapse of the world’s credit markets resulted in a stock market tail-spin that now threatens to spoil her efforts. Sam is NOT about to let that happen! Her goal for today’s meeting is to find low-cost, yet high-performance solutions that will enable her firm to reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage in this tough marketplace.

“Joe,” Sam continued, “You remember our IT guys. They’re here today to help us figure out what new technologies we should consider to help us work smarter and faster. And consequently, we’re asking you to tell us the top three things that challenge you and make it difficult to get your job done.”

Joe didn’t ponder long before offering his reply. “I was out of the office yesterday afternoon dealing with my sick daughter and missed an important call. The client left a detailed voice mail on my office phone, but I didn’t get that message until this morning and now the issue is critical. It would help if those calls could get transferred to my cell phone, or I was somehow alerted that I had new voice mail. It would also be great if I could reply to that client’s question from home, but I don’t currently have the ability to access our client database from anywhere but my office computer. And thirdly, I would love to hold meaningful meetings with our clients without driving to their offices all over the state. If I could cut down on the 12-16 hours a week I spend in a car, not to mention the travel costs, that could add up to a huge cost saving for us!”

Sam looked to her consultants and posed the question, “So, what can we do to help make Joe’s life easier?” The reply came swiftly, “Cloud Computing!” “Excuse me??” asked Samantha.

“Let me explain. With your existing data and telecommunications infrastructure, everything you need to conduct business is located just down the hall, in your server closet. The storage and processing of information takes place here, and you can freely access that information as long as you remain in the building. Now imagine if you moved some of your data and applications to servers on the Internet. You won’t really know where those servers are located and don’t really care – they live in the Cloud. You could then access your critical business information just as easily from home, or the coffee shop, or your client’s office, or anywhere else. You absolutely must have a reliable high-speed Internet connection at every work location, and there are many other issues to consider for it to work correctly, but that’s the concept of Cloud Computing. Besides the ability to access your files from anywhere, you may also realize cost savings because you avoid most up-front costs for software and hardware, and don’t pay for ongoing upgrade and support costs. You typically pay-as-you-go and pay for only what you use.”

“OK, but specifically how can this approach help Joe perform his job better?” quizzed Sam. “Well, let’s discuss the communication breakdown issue that he mentioned. Believe it or not, you can retire that 14 year old phone system and begin to utilize a Cloud based phone system that will provide you with a tremendous number of features and benefits that you don’t currently enjoy. With a hosted solution, every employee will get their own phone number, an Internet enabled phone handset, and access to an Internet application where they can configure whatever features they want to use. You’ll still keep your main business number, but we’ll add a group of direct dial numbers. We can program Joe’s cell phone, his home-office phone, and his desk phone to ring simultaneously, so he can answer whichever phone is most convenient for him at the time. And Joe, if you’re in a meeting or cannot answer the call, we can have the caller’s voice-mail message sent to your E-mail Inbox as an attachment so you can listen to it with your computer or smart phone. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Similarly, a Cloud based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application will provide many features that your current customer database lacks. Joe, you’ll be able to access the data from any Internet connected computer. You won’t need any special software installed. Just start Internet Explorer, navigate to your CRM website, login and go. You’re going to love it! And Sam, you’re going to love it when his productivity begins to soar!

And finally, we can set you up with a Cloud based web conferencing portal to help keep Joe off the road. Web conferencing is a very mature technology, but only recently has it become available at a price that small businesses can afford. With your clients participating in the virtual meeting from their PCs, you can deliver a presentation, provide training, brainstorm ideas, collaborate on a whiteboard, edit files, and finalize deals without the hassle of travel. Because you’ll be travelling less, you’ll have more time to prepare for each meeting, which will likely result in more productive client engagements.

Now Sam, before you jump in with both feet, I’m not advocating that you move all of your file-data into the Cloud. I believe you still have a need for your on premises server to host applications that are not yet built for the web. But it does make sense to take advantage of the Cloud technologies that are likely to have the greatest impact on your success and profitability!”