Not Your Typical IT Guys

I was hanging out last week at the Maryland CPA Summit with a lot of brilliant folks!  Speaking of which, I was chatting with Eric Cohen (have you heard of XBRL?  Yeah that’s him!) Eric was reviewing our propaganda and kept seeing a common theme he was seeing throughout the conference, “Cloud Computing.” The theme of Cloud Computing was puzzling Eric because he was perplexed but what is so new about  Cloud Computing… he had heard of it before.  So Eric asked, “What about Cloud Computing today is so different than what Red Gorilla of the 1990’s was doing?” (yes kids we had computers back then)

Like all good experts (I type this with a grain of salt), I answered his question with a question, “Who was Red Gorilla?”  I jumped online found someone who had cached their website and also found this article from CNET in December of 2000, discussing the fate of Red Gorilla.  You see, Red Gorilla was an early days ASP (Application Service Provider) that was truly ahead of its time.  They had developed an online Time and Billing system that they were offering with freemium pricing.  If you explore the website you will find the screens shots are pretty similar to screen shots you would see on many of today’s time and billing systems.

Well, to sum up the CNET article, Red Gorilla vanished one day with 33,000 clients SOL.  Way back in the 1990’s there were some key Saas questions that nobody was asking.  Those questions are the same concerns today that many folks are talking about and still don’t necessarily have answers depending on the Service Provider.

• Who owns the data?
• Can I get my data out in a usable format?
• Do you guarantee up-time?
• What happens if I stop using your service?

At Simplified Innovations is seems we are often getting lumped into the SaaS bucket.  When in fact we are not SaaS (PaaS is more accurate but that is another conversation for another day), we don’t develop software nor do we use a browser to deliver the software.  Don’t get me wrong, many of the benefits of SaaS are exist with Simplified Innovations, however we can candidly answer these questions.

• Who owns the date? —— YOU DO!  Its your data, we claim no rights to it.  The data was yours before you being working with us and the data is yours if you ever decide to leave.
• Can I get my data out in a usable format? —– YES!  We don’t convert your data into some proprietary database format that will require a conversion program
• Do you guaranteed up-time? —– YES!  We have a Service Level Agreement with all of our clients guaranteeing system availability.  We have spent significant time and money developing a virtualized infrastructure to ensure we can meet these guarantees.
• What happens if I stop using your service? —— YOU GET YOUR DATA BACK.  We will furnish you with your data and software for you to manage in-house or take to another service provider.  We have no need to hold our clients hostage.

How many of you remember Red Gorilla?  What do you think, have we learned anything?

I call it the Pantry effect.  Consider this for a moment.  Your hungry and need a snack.  So you go to the kitchen to peruse the shelves for something to satisfy that hunger.  However, finding the right snack all of a sudden becomes a daunting challenge.  You have organized your kitchen into a dozen different pantries organized by type of snack.  A pantry for chips, another for pretzels, yet another for variety fruit cups… and so on. So now, you either need to open all 12 pantries and try to make a decision OR you need to decide which type of snack you want before you can even begin perusing the right pantry of choices.

This is the same challenge that companies adopting all SaaS solutions are running into.  Here is a typical employees thought process, “I need to look up a client phone number… which application do I need? what is the web address? what is my username and password?… doah i hope I picked the application with the most recent information!”

Don’t get me wrong… I love SaaS, it has MANY benefits that make it a perfect solution for many organizations.  But we need to review what history has taught us.  For years everyone said, “Pick best of breed apps.” Now everyone is retracing their steps… “Maybe I should have picked the time and billing system that integrates with our contact management system even though it was missing a few bells and whistles.” There is something to be said for truelly integrated systems.

One day, Alexander the SaaS Great is going to slice this Gordian Knot in half, however until then you are faced with many pantry’s that don’t talk to each other and don’t have the same path’s to entry or username and password requirements.

Until then Cloud Solution providers like Simplified Innovations are the better choice.  We can take all of your existing “Shelfware” apps and put them in the cloud for you.  You maintain all of the integrations and benefits of having a single pantry plus get ALL the benefits of the “Cloud.”  In addition there is nothing NEW for your staff to learn.  Everything maintains the same comfortable interface you have been using in your business for years.

Many software providers are beginning to SaaSify their apps, however before jumping into their cloud weigh the options and consider sticking with the model you already have, just get rid of the hardware burden.  Another thought to consider… how many apps do you have that you have put off an update too because of some feature change that would disrupt your business??  If you are in that vendors SaaS cloud you no longer have the power to hold off on that update until it makes sense for your business!  When they decided the update gets pushed its a disruption you have to handle at that time. 

Bottom line, embrace the cloud, but don’t jump into the SaaS bucket without considering all your options.  SaaS can’t completely replace your existing technical infrastrucure… however we can!

As you can tell I am clearly a fan of Office 2010.  And the enhancements to PowerPoint are definitely part of the recipe that makes me such a fan of 2010.

First and definitely notable are the variety of new slide transitions.  The transitions really are smooth and well done, see a snapshot of them below:

In addition to the new slide transitions is a number of new Word Art and Smart Art options.

The Themes have been upgraded as well.  They now include some layouts that truly look professional so you don’t have to go hunting for a nice theme or create one yourself… ladies and gentleman, we have finally passed Kindergarten!  The snapshot below can be a bit deceiving, they look a lot better once applied. 

The management of the themes has been enhancement also.  If you are like me and like to give the theme your own tweak it is really easy to add it to the list of custom themes for reuse in the future.

If you recall one of the few enhancements in 2007 was the new styles for your pictures, the frames and shadows… well they have put some tweaks on those as well and also offered the same types of styles for video.  So now you can embed your YouTube videos and their own cool frames.

And now for a feature I just discovered however will be using often, the ability to run a live PowerPoint presentation through the web without any software, for you or the attendee. they just need a Windows Live ID.

By Broadcasting the sideshow you are given a link from and MS PowerPoint server to send out to your attendees.  They click the link and the presentation pops up in their browser.  The transitions are reduced to save bandwidth however slides and text does fade in and out very nicely.  The viewer can use Silverlight, however doesn’t require it, to run the presentation. If the viewer doesn’t have Silverlight there is a link to install it if they want to.

Overall, PowerPoint 2010 is definitely a game changer with respect to presentations.  Until now I had been playing with alternatives like Prezi and a few others, as well as considering Keynote for Mac… but MS has won me back with this one!