Category Archives: Technology

An Accountant for life? Are Xero and Kashflow changing the way we use Accountants?


The British are a naturally hesitant bunch.  Whilst the rest of Europe feels comfortable swapping bank accounts in the same way you’d swap mobile providers, in the UK we get twitchy and a Watchdog report in 2008 suggested consumers were more likely to get divorced that switch bank accounts.

It is much the same with professional services like Solicitors and Accountants.  It is common to hear people refer to their Accountant who is at the other end of the country, who they have used since they lived there as a child – perhaps the same firm their parents used.

But there is a change afoot.  The new breed of Cloud Based Accounting services like Xero and Kashflow are changing the way individuals and businesses choose their accountant.  When Keboko launched we selected the Cloud Accounting package first, and then looked for an Accounting firm who had the necessary skills to use it appropriately.

I wanted to pose some questions to Carl Reader of Accounting Firm Dennis and Turnbull to get his view on how these changes are affecting the Accounting profession.

Do you think the concept of “An Accountant for Life” still holds true?

Carl Reader

Carl Reader of Dennis and Turnbull

Absolutely, but not in the way that it used to. Historically, clients of accountancy firms have stayed with their accountants through loyalty, or a perception that it is difficult to change accountants – much in the same way that they might have had the same bank throughout their adult life. Clients are now much more aware that this isn’t the case, and in fact qualified accountants who are registered with professional bodies have “clearance” procedures that simplify the changeover process.

Having said the above, I still believe that an accountant can be for life, provided that the service level is at or above the level that the client expects.

What attributes do the new breed of Accountants have?

To be able to compete the new breed of accountants will need to be able to step outside of the traditional comfort zone of financial ratios, accounting disclosures and tax rules, and have a much broader skill set – a small sample of these skills would include an understanding of marketing, sales processes, psychology / change management, technology, negotiation… the list goes on. More importantly, however, is the ability of the accountant to advise clients appropriately in these areas, and to understand their own limitations so that they can advise the client to seek further help where appropriate.

Attaining even a basic understanding of the above skills will require significant additional time investment into professional development, and of course it is essential that any accountant is fully competent in the basics of tax and accountancy.

Is Accounting still a localised service?

Not at all. In fairness, this has never been the case and accountancy / tax services have been offered remotely, however historically this would not have been common as accountants were under restrictions in relation to their advertising. These restrictions have been lifted, so there are now firms such as ours that are marketing nationally through Google and other methods.

Personally, my client base is spread across the UK, and I could relocate to any part of the UK and still be near to a similar number of clients. In the future, as cloud technology becomes more common place amongst the general business community, there would be no need to restrict this to the UK as theoretically I could perform all but the face-to-face work anywhere in the world.

Cloud Accounting brings a huge opportunity to firms like ours. I believe that customers of accounting software will choose their accounting provider based on the software they use, rather than based on location. This has been evident to me through our experience of being a leading firm of online accountants, as we are getting a significant level of leads from our online provider’s website.

Accounting Calculator

Are you paying your Accountant to do this?

Whereas in the past a client would ask their accountant about the software they should use (and invariably getting the answer “Sage”), they are now searching Google for this advice and finding online packages that are ranking above traditional packages. Many accountants have not yet embraced this new generation of software, and as such these business owners are left searching for an advisor who can work with their chosen package.

Essentially the Accounting package is now at the core of the decision process, just as you would service your Mercedes car at a Mercedes dealer, and then swap to a BMW dealer for a BMW car.

What are the leading Cloud Accounting Services that your clients use?

Primarily, my clients use a package called Xero, which is an accounting package developed in New Zealand. We do however have clients using other packages such as Kashflow, iCash and Freeagent.

I am a strong believer that accountants need to be aware of all software packages, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each, so that they can offer appropriate advice to each client based on their needs. They do not need to be technical experts of the software, as ultimately that is what the technical support department are for!

There are many other complimentary packages that tie into a cloud strategy, including Dropbox, Echosign, Google Apps and Workflow Max. Longer term, I would imagine that even traditional PC-based software such as Sage and Microsoft Office will move completely into a cloud environment.

How has Cloud Accounting changed the way you interact with your clients?

In more ways than you can imagine – we have been able to offer the “accountant next door” service to clients in Inverness, Belfast, Cornwall, Kent, and pretty much every area in the UK in between these. We have been able to systemise our internal processes in most cases to increase efficiencies as a practice, and have also been able to deliver additional value to niche markets through the live data that we can capture.

But more importantly, our clients have been able to benefit from the reduced hassle of an accounting package that our team can also access – no more emailing spreadsheets, sending USB keys in the post, etc.

Summary

Just as Keboko is advising Business Owners to get familiar with new Cloud solutions like Google Apps and Salesforce to change the way they do business, as a Business Owner myself I would recommend taking some time to look at the new breed of Cloud Accounting packages.  Don’t wait for your current Accounting firm to tell you – they might never get round to it.

I’d like to thank Carl Reader of Dennis and Turnbull for taking the time to answer my questions, and would invite you to ask further questions and add comments below.

Do you use a Cloud Accounting service?  What are your thoughts about having your Accounts in the Cloud?  Do you currently send unencrypted spreadsheets to your Accountant?

I hope you have enjoyed this post and found it useful.  If so, please subscribe in the sidebar and share with your network.

If Salesforce is too expensive, you are doing something wrong!


I spend a lot of time speaking with businesses of all sizes, from a single business owner, up to large corporates.  A message that I hear from many businesses towards the SMB end of the market, let’s say sub-100 employees is along the lines of:

  • We looked at Salesforce but it was too expensive
  • Salesforce is designed for Enterprise customers
  • We’re too small for Salesforce
  • We use ACT!/Goldmine/Sage/Excel because it is cheaper

I want to take this opportunity to say “Stop! If you think Salesforce is too expensive, then you are doing something wrong!”

Salesforce Costs

Focus on the Savings first.

As you may have read in my previous post Touch me Baby! Why the iPad could be so useful for Small Business, I relayed a story about a poor CRM Consultant who asked his client “What do you want from your new CRM system?”  Because the client didn’t know what they didn’t know they answered “Somewhere to store our contacts so we can call them up.”  If this is all you want to do then Salesforce is very expensive and you will end up buying some simple software for a few hundred pounds.

But that is like going into a Car Showroom and telling the white toothed, big tied salesperson that what you are looking for in a car is somewhere comfortable to sit.  You don’t need a car, you need an armchair.

When Keboko first started we had one person, and needed one Salesforce licence.  You cannot get a smaller business than that.  Let me explain why from my perspective this was one of the most cost effective purchases our business has made.

  1. Web-to-Lead. This Salesforce feature allows us to capture leads on our website and have them automatically scheduled as leads within Salesforce, allocated out to the correct people based on the lead routing we will implement (i.e. larger clients will go to our specialist Enterprise team).  At previous companies I’ve worked at we employed an individual to do just this.  Even assuming they did it as a part time role, let’s assume a £15,000 saving from this one feature.
  2. Dashboards and Reports. Management and the Board thrive on information.  It’s their drug.  What’s happening?  What has happened?  What is going to happen?  I’ve seen huge Sales Operations teams attached to Sales teams who’s responsibility is getting updates from teams, collating, integrating, massaging, reviewing and presenting this information.  Every sales team I’ve worked in has had the weekly nightmare ‘ The Team Forecasting Meeting’ – “John, what’s your forecast? Tim, what’s your forecast?”  What a waste of time.  Having everything neatly presented in a single system for the hierarchy to monitor in realtime – let’s assume we save a full head in Sales Operations at £25,000.
  3. Self Service. Salesforce is not just Sales Force Automation – it has one of the most functional Service and Support systems available.  Within it you have Solutions – answers to Support queries.  Every time we answer a question that hasn’t been answered before we add in a new Solution, and will make it public on our website using the Salesforce Self-Serve functionality.  By enabling clients to help themselves we can redirect our support staff at more proactive activities.  Again, I would suggest that this either saves us a full head, or reduces costs elsewhere to the same effect – £25,000
  4. AppExchange. Salesforce runs on a platform called Force.com.  Other companies can develop on Force.com and this creates the iTunes of business software – the AppExchange.  If you need an Expenses app, or an HR app, or an Inventory app, or an Email Marketing app – they are all there, with some of them developed by Force.com Labs themselves at no charge.  Keboko has supersized our Salesforce implemenation with a number of these, including a Professional Services Automation package allowing us to monitor all our employees, their skills, their timesheets, and the projects they are working on.  Total additional cost – £0.00.  I would have expected to pay upwards of £10,000 for an appliance based solution with hardware, maintenance and bandwidth.

In just four simple out of the box features I am confident that I have saved Keboko £75,000 in costs.  This has been fantastic for our cashflow, and put Salesforce at the centre of all of our Business Processes.

If you have had a look at Salesforce in the past, and thought it was too expensive and have read this and thought “Oooh, I might have a look at that again!” I would urge you to wait.  First off, spend some time with your teams, understand what their processes are, what the bottlenecks are, what are the opportunities for growth.  Try and forget the way you do things now, and imagine how things might work in an ideal world.

Then you can go and look at Salesforce again and really stretch its capabilities across your entire business from the moment someone first hears about you, to their 15th upgrade/reorder in 2020.

I hope you have found this post useful.  If so please subscribe in the sidebar and share with your network.

I appreciate your comments and vigourous debate below!

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Google, Salesforce, the Data Protection Act and what that means for your business.


Across the multiple LinkedIn Groups, Twitter and Facebook pages, and on the blog itself I have been humbled by they fantastic and vigorous debate that the blog’s posts generate.  It is clear that amongst the Business Community there is a real need to understand what Cloud Computing really means to your Company and to your bottom line.  When we are able to forget about the technology, and start thinking about what that actually enables us to do then the true excitement starts – remote working, disperse teams working on a single document, sales people able to cut out “admin day”, MD’s being able to chase up debtors in realtime, IT teams being able to align with the business strategy.

There have also been some common themes in the comments, where there are natural concerns around what it means to a business to have their applications running outside of their network:

  1. What if my internet connection goes down?
  2. How secure is my data/what are the legal implications?

Today, I want to spend some time on the second point.  I want to try and differentiate between two words, that in the ‘old world’ meant the same thing, but in the ‘new world’ actually mean the opposite – Control and Security.

When you run your applications in your own network, and in your own office, you have control.  You can see the boxes.  You can see the light is on and hear the fan.  Perhaps you are not happy with them under a desk so you buy a server cabinet, perhaps as your rack of hardware grows you dedicate a cupboard or small room to it.  You provide a combination lock for the door and install some CCTV to the building.  You have RedCare on your Phoneline.  You add a redundant Exchange server in case the first one goes down.  You have a back-up tape system and take the tapes home every night (or try to).  You have a security guard who patrols the business park.  He keeps an eye on things at night.

“I have control.  I have security.”

In a Cloud environment when you add a new contact record into Salesforce the data is stored…….somewhere on the internet.  When you send an important email through Google Apps the record of it is…..I’m not sure.  When I add in this month’s invoices in Xero they are all kept…….oh dear me!

“I have no control.  I have no security.”

Google Salesforce Cloud Responsibilities

What are your responsibilities towards data?

But this is incorrect.  Have a think about your personal bank account.  We all hear mythical stories of the man who kept his money under the mattress, because he knew where it was, and he had control.  He felt it was more secure.  But you and I know that our money is much more secure in a bank.  After all – they are not just looking after our money, they are looking after billions of pounds worth, and therefore their security will be much greater than my Yale lock on the front door.  More so, because they look after so much money, they can afford to provide much better services to clients than my mattress could provide.  Interest for a start, Cash machines so I can access my money anywhere, and because banking is a cloud model (i.e. my money isn’t held in my branch) I can use internet banking from any connected device to manage my funds and pay my bills.

When we look at Google and Salesforce as two of the leading Cloud providers we need to do our due diligence as we would for an on-premise solution, but we must also recognise that the physical, technical and human security that they provide will be way beyond what even the largest Corporates could afford to deploy themselves.

If we take Google for example – they provide a Security Whitepaper which goes into great detail explaining the multiple levels of security that they provide to you as a client.  As a business owner the question I ask myself is “Could I get close to matching this in my own office?”  The answer is no.

Salesforce also provide an insight into the levels of security they provide in their Security Statement.  Again, as a business owner I take heart from the fact that Enterprise clients of Salesforce like Bank of America, or Japan Post will have done far more rigourous due diligence than I would require.

The second part of the data security question is about it’s location.  As a business owner collecting and holding customer data you will know only too well your responisbilities under the Data Protection Act, FSA Regulations and PCI Compliance.

I am not a qualified legal advisor so the following should not be taken as official advice, but I can offer my assessment of the situation.

Principle 8 of the Data Protection Act says that:

“Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the EEA unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.”

In real words – you can’t send personal data to a country with lower standards of protection than the originating country.  The USA (where most Cloud data is held) is not an approved country, and so the US and EU have set up Safe Harbour (Safe Harbor) – whereby US Companies can become approved and therefore fit within the Data Protection Act Guideline.  You can see that Google and Salesforce are both accredited by searching here, and indeed check any other Cloud vendor that you may be considering.

If you take Credit Card Payments then you will be subject to PCI Compliance to ensure the integrity of that data.  It is unlikely that you would want this data to be transferred to your Cloud Email or CRM services, but it would be worth investigating any potential liabilities here.  The PCI Security Standards Council does not appear to have any specific guidance on how Cloud vendors can approve themselves at this time, so worth keeping an eye on their site.

If you are regulated by the Financial Services Authority, then their latest publication on this matter is this 2008 document, “Your responsibilities for customer data security”  A couple of points that I take from this document are the guidance around taking data off-site, i.e. employees leaving USB keys or laptops on trains – with Cloud Computing this problem disappears as there is nothing on the laptop.  The document also points out responsibility for backing up data.  In a cloud environment your data is held on multiple redundant systems, but with both Google and Salesforce you do have the ability to make back-ups to store on-site if you wish – a complete opposite of what used to happen!

When it comes to third party suppliers the FSA guidance is

“You should know who your third party suppliers are, the security arrangements around any customer data that they hold or have access to, and how they vet their staff.”

My advice here is to remember, just because it isn’t in your office doesn’t mean it is not your responsibility.  You should take the time to review the security statements of your chosen providers, check what standards they comply with, and ensure that should you ever have to defend or discuss your data strategy that you made use of all the information available.

As a business owner myself I am comfortable that I have done this and am comfortable to be using Google Apps and Salesforce to run my business.

I hope this post has been useful.  I’m sure there will be some interesting debate and I look forward to your comments.  Please feel free to share with your network and subscribe in the sidebar.

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Touch me baby! Why the iPad could be so useful for Small Business.


As you may know there are reputedly four stages to learning:

  • Unconsciously Incompetent (I’d be good at driving a car!)
  • Consciously Incompetent (That first lesson was very embarrassing)
  • Consciously Competent (I’ve just passed my test)
  • Unconsciously Competent (I can’t remember anything about my drive home)

The stage that I am most interested is the first one – where you don’t know what you don’t know.  I was with a client last week and they mentioned how a CRM Consultancy had charged them £800 to come in for a day and ask them what they wanted from a new CRM system.

No surprises that because they didn’t know what they didn’t know the day ended with “So you want somewhere to store all of your contacts and accounts”  £800 wasted and one step closer to a very expensive rolodex.  Had the consultant been able to help the customer understand what they didn’t know (by uncovering the details of their business processes and understanding how these might be improved) then the client would have moved to knowing what they don’t know and been able to provide much better information (“we need to save costs on re-keying data into multiple systems, we need to be able to track which marketing campaigns end up being most profitable, we need to understand why certain sales people get up to speed quicker than others etc.”)

The reason I mention this story is that I had my own Unconsciously Incompetent moment last weekend with the iPad.  I use one for business as it is light to carry around and, because I run Keboko completely in the cloud, I can access my email and documents, CRM system, support tickets, view my cashflow and even chase debtors whilst with customers or at home.  Great as this is, it is still just using the iPad as a mobile web browser.

At the end of last week though a new App was released called Flipboard.  Flipboard takes a wide range of your social media news streams Facebook, Twitter, Tech Crunch, etc and turns them into a social magazine written just for you.  Using the touch screen you ‘flip’ through your personalised magazine featuring your friends, family and business colleagues.

My personal Google Apps magazine!

If you use Twitter Lists (a subsection of people you follow) then you can have a separate page for these – so if you are a business owner and you follow a range of Business Newspapers and Networking Groups on Twitter, then this becomes it’s own magazine.

My Consciously Incompetent moment, was in seeing a whole new world opened up by the touch screen.  A simple ‘flip’ of a page helped me realised that most Cloud Applications today are built for a point and click mouse – even on an iPad you point and tap.  But as developers start to understand how we could interact better by stretching, pinching, twisting, and multi-tapping – the possibilities for the way applications are developed in the future are immense.

Why is this important to Small Businesses?

In the past application development was left to big Enterprise – it was expensive, time-consuming and you needed to be technical.  Now Small and Medium sized businesses are able to use Cloud Computing to quickly develop low cost applications for their clients.  If business owners spend time thinking about their customers, and how they interact with their business, and start to imagine how touch might improve and differentiate.

Perhaps:

  • a Physio asking a patient to draw on a body outline where they feel pain
  • an Accoutant being able to reconcile accounts by dragging transactions around the screen
  • a Plant Hire company being able to send machinery from one client site to another by dragging it on a Google Map
  • a house hunter being able to draw a circle around the region they are interested in on the Estate Agent’s site
  • a Web Designer allowing his clients to drag and resize sections of their new website

There is no limit to what could be developed, and it could be the biggest opportunity for Small Businesses to really differentiate against bigger competitors.

I now know what I don’t know.  I know that the ideas will have to come from you the business owner.  You know how you interact with your clients.  Your imagination can start to drive this innovation.  Keboko’s job will be to ask you the right questions to help both of us know what we don’t know!

Do you have an iPad?  Do you use it for business?  How do you think the concept of touch might improve the way your business interacts with your clients?

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  If so please subscribe in the sidebar, and share with your network.

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63% of Small Businesses have not heard of Cloud Computing – are you one of them?


I came across a news item this week reporting a recent survey of SMB’s (1-99 employees) from the US, UK, Germany, Italy and Brazil.  The survey by Techaisle found that only 37% of Small Businesses had heard of Cloud Computing.  Of those that had heard of Cloud Computing, 13% did not understand what it meant.

Over in technology vendor land there is a frantic buzz around Cloud Computing.  The leading vendors trip over themselves in an effort to tout their Cloud credentials.  New Cloud Heavyweights such as Google and Salesforce are reporting massive revenues but barely existed 10 years ago.  Venture Capital funding is pouring into Cloud based companies.  There is a massive amount of hype within the technology industry, and you can quantify the interest by typing “Cloud Computing” into Google Trends.

Google Trends Cloud Computing

Google searches for Cloud Computing are rising fast.

But back in the real world of real businesses, of accountants practices, of small hotel chains, of construction companies the term Cloud Computing has no resonance with the majority of people.

I’ve been intrigued as I go through the start-up phase for Keboko and I’ve been speaking with friends and acquaintances across a diverse range of industries.  The reaction to my statement that Keboko is “a Cloud Service Provider, helping small and medium sized companies focus on their core business by migrating their applications into the Cloud.” has been an eye opener.

Blank stares all round.  Usually followed by “that sounds very complicated!”

It’s important for me to understand that Cloud Computing is a different language to most businesses and that for it to really succeed companies like ours, and the leading vendors themselves like Google and Salesforce and Xero will have to leave the technology behind, and focus on what they will actually “do” for a business and it’s bottom line.

If you are one of the 63% that have not heard of Cloud Computing, then the best analogy I can give you is Electricity.  In the early days of Electrical Power businesses would purchase, install, maintain and run their own power generation systems.  Usually a steam generator, or perhaps some kind of water wheel.  This was mainly due to necessity, in that electricity could not be transmitted over long distances.  But in time, the transfer to Alternating Current saw the rise of the Utility Company, a business that generated Electricity on a much larger scale and with a much higher level of service.  Because they could scale to hundreds, and then thousands of clients they experienced much lower costs per unit, and passed these cost reductions on to their clients.

Of course there were some larger companies who held out – “Electricity is too important to leave to someone else” but they too reached the point where the cost of running their own power station was too high, and they could never reach the service levels of the Utility Companies.  Today as you run your business you take it for granted that you use an electricity company instead of generating power yourself.  (Further detail on the Electricity analogy is in my Book Review of The Big Switch).

Messy Server Room

Are you trying to run your own power station?

Now, if we look at how businesses have adopted technology.  When you launched you probably just needed a laptop or PC.  Then you recruited a few more people and needed an email server, and maybe a file server to store shared documents.  This was a bit beyond your own team so you brought in an external consultant (or maybe recruited someone).  He said you needed a firewall to protect yourself and an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam appliance.  He suggested you get a back-up server and you take tapes off site each night (or each week if you are busy).  You then needed an accounts package, and so that sits on another server.  Oh and there is a database of customers that you use.

All of this is on your network (or maybe hosted by your IT consultant), it is your kit, you paid for it, and it is depreciating on your P&L.  It is probably not the current version (Exchange 2003, or an old version of Sage) and you probably couldn’t say which box is adding the most value to your business.

Now to understand the benefit of Cloud Computing just overlay the Electricity Analogy on your IT systems.  Stop “generating IT” yourselves, start using a “utility IT provider”, always be on the most current version, own no depreciating assets, redirect your IT employees to business growth strategies and ultimately stop running a mini-datacentre and focus on your core business – accounting, retail, manufacturing….

There will always be some people who say “IT is too important to leave to someone else,” but as with water, electricity, gas and even banking, some of the core struts to our existence are better delivered as a service than by trying to do it ourselves.

If this idea has piqued your interest, then your first stop will be to have a chat with your internal IT team, or your external IT Consultant – “I’ve heard about Cloud Computing – what do you think?”

Now I don’t know your IT guy, but he might feel that Cloud Computing threatens his existence (who needs a turbine maintenance team when you are plugging in…) so I would urge to you reframe the question, “If we moved some of our applications to the Cloud and freed up 40% of your time and budget, how do you think you could help us better with our core business strategy of ….more new customers, more products per customer, lower debtor days?” (amend as applicable)

Immediately you have turned this into a positive change for him (and you) and you have an employee or consultant who was a cost to the business, focusing on business growth.  That really is the heart of Cloud Computing.  Not the technology.

I hope this has been a helpful introduction to Cloud Computing.  If you’d like to understand more then Keboko would be happy to run an individual session for your business, either over the phone or in person.  Just contact me through the contact form on the Keboko page on this site.

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The Emperor’s New Clothes – Private Cloud is just Virtualised Hosting isn’t it?


This week has seen the second hosting of the Cloud Computing World Forum at Olympia in London.  Three days of conference, workshops and exhibitions focused entirely on the emerging Cloud industry.  I attended yesterday and learned a lot, validating my own ideas of what Cloud is, and what it isn’t and where the opportunity lies for business owners.

As with any new technology there is a huge amount of hype – “Cloud is going to change the way the human race functions” (no-one actually said that).  When you consider that perhaps less than 5% of businesses have actually deployed a Cloud solution it could be said that a three day expo is a bit over the top for the current demand, but the organisers had an impressive line of up speakers – not just vendors like Microsoft, SAP, and Salesforce touting their Cloud credentials, but Enterprise customers like the Telegraph Media Group happy to explain how they have got ahead of the pack and migrated much of their non-core infrastructure to the Cloud.

There seemed to be a lot of attendees, certainly compared to other technology love-ins I’ve been to recently.  I was unsure who they were though – I don’t believe they were business owners.  Perhaps some CIO’s for larger companies, or traditional vendors trying to understand what the competition is and how to leverage this new market.

Before I dive into my the title subject, let me list the main nomenclature used yesterday and within the Cloud Industry

Public Cloud – This is what I call True Cloud – a multi-tenant, hosted service such as Google Apps, Salesforce.com or Facebook.

Private Cloud – This is where a large Enterprise, or their outsourcer hosts their specific virtualised servers in a secure datacentre.

Hybrid Cloud – This is where a Private Cloud is extended to leverage Public Cloud resources – perhaps a database hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Community Cloud – This is where multiple organisations in a similar industry use a single cloud – such as the G-Cloud touted by the UK Government.

SaaS – This is a Cloud application for use by end users such as Google Apps or Salesforce.com

PaaS – This is a Cloud Platform for ISV’s to develop SaaS applications on such as Google Apps Marketplace or Force.com

IaaS- This is raw computing power, either servers in a datacentre, or from a Public Cloud such as Amazon Web Services.

One thing that struck me was the heavy focus on Private Cloud.  With every presentation about Private Cloud I sit through, and every SI, or Outsourcer that pushes their own version of Private Cloud – is it just me that wants to stand up and scream: “You’re just talking about virtualised hosting!”

Private Cloud Data Centre

If you can point to your server here, then you are not True Cloud

Am I missing something?  You take a bunch of servers, host them in your or their datacentre, virtualise them, and run your applications on them.  As specific applications need more or less you spread the resources around.

You might have heard the phrase “Cloudwashing” which refers to technology vendors taking traditional on-premise applications, hosting them in the internet and slapping the term ‘Cloud’ on it.  Hosting companies have been hosting for decades.  They called it….hosting.  Now because of a bit of VM-Ware or Hyper-V they call it Private Cloud and the enterprise market goes weak at the knees.

The Emperor’s new clothes if you ask me.  ”The benefits of Cloud with the security of your own infrastructure.”  I don’t buy it.

Cloud for me is Public Cloud – and requires three things:

Someone else hosts it – i.e. nothing on your own network

Multi-Tenant/Single Instance – you cannot point to a box and say “that is my server.”  Every client globally runs the same instance of the software.

Rental model – no Capital investment to tie you in.

It is only with these three tenets that you get the massive scale and cost reductions that the Cloud can truly provide – the key one being the second point – multi-tenant/single instance.  By having millions of users on your single instance you spread your development and infrastructure costs across a much wider base.  Now I’m not saying that ‘Private Cloud’ (Virtualised Hosting) doesn’t have it’s place – it absolutely does.  Large Enterprise has specific niche applications that are  not available on the Public Cloud, or at this stage the security credentials of the providers do not match their specific requirements.  There will always be some applications that you wish to keep on your own network.

But don’t hijack the Cloud buzzword because it makes vendors feel better.  Private Cloud = Hosting.  Infrastructure as a Service = Hosting.  True Cloud is Public Cloud and SaaS.  PaaS creeps into True Cloud once a SaaS application has been developed on it.  Perhaps Private Cloud allows individuals that don’t really buy in to the Cloud concept to tell their CEO that they are ‘in the Cloud’ whilst actually carrying on exactly as they have done in the past.

As a business owner you will have to do a lot of due diligence to work out exactly what it is you are or are not getting.  The word Cloud has now become so diluted as to have little real relevance to your decision making.

I am ready to stand corrected on my assessment of Private Cloud.  Have I missed something fundamental?

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Google Apps – Innovation in Review


Yesterday evening I was on a webex presented by the Google Apps product team, and it really brought home to me how the transition to Cloud Computing is going to change the way that businesses use technology.  For those of you that have read “Who moved my cheese?” you will know that there are a number of ways of dealing with change – and my experience of Cloud shows me a common reaction is to dig in the heels, decide not to understand the full capabilities of the new technology and create a number of reasons as to why it “would never be right for our business.”

However, when you start look at the issue from the other side, and think “how could my business work better by leveraging these technologies” then I think the positives outweigh any concerns pretty quickly.  Accept change, and work out how you can benefit before Mr. Competitor does.  It’s very rare that your IT Budget actually differentiates you from the competition – and this is one of those times.

Constant Innovation by Google

Constant Innovation

The presentation was called Innovation in Review, and ran through highlights of new releases over the past 12 months.  You have to put this in context with the traditional way of buying business software – spend a long time deciding, take the leap, spend a lot of money, customise and install, sweat the asset, look at new version, spend a long time deciding etc etc.  How many businesses are on the latest version of Exchange?  How many users are on the latest version of Office?

The new paradigm is Constant Innovation.  Every day new cloud products are released, and all your users need to do to get them is refresh their browser.

Google have made over 100 such improvements over the past year, and that means the clients that signed up to Google Apps didn’t have to spend a long time deciding when to take a ‘snapshot’ and make their purchase.  As long as they believed in the Cloud concept they could make their purchase and await a long line of constant innovation helping their business to work better.

A great example from the consumer world would be the iPad.  I’ve leapt straight in because I think the evolution of this form factor is going to define the next ten years of personal computing.  As I type this post on my iMac I look down at the keypad and think – in a few years we’ll laugh about the “Key Pad”

But many of my work colleagues are saying “I’ll wait until the next version – it’s bound to be better.”  Imagine buying an iPad now and when they release the next version in 6 months they send you a new one via UPS.  Welcome to Cloud Computing!

The presentation will be available online shortly and I will post the link when I get it.  Just to give you an idea of some of the changes that have arrived over the past few months:

Drag and Drop attachments – you can now drag an attachment from your Windows Explorer or Mac Finder into your Gmail window and automatically attach it – saving time.

Drag and Drop photos – you can drag an image from your desktop or folder and drop it right into your email, much easier than copying and pasting.

Inserting Invitations into an email – instead of having to send a separate Calendar invite, you can open up an invite within your existing email chain in Gmail.

Gmail search has been improved – if you don’t have Gmail it is hard to explain how easy it is to find an email that was sent a while back.  What is a .pst file again?!

Forgotten Attachment Detector – how many times have you received an email back “Nothing attached?” Now Gmail spots this and warns you.  Little touches that save time and make you more professional.

2 Way Calendar Sync for Blackberry – keeping you on top of things on the road.

Upload any file to Docs - The mythical G-Drive, you can now upload any doc format and share them with your contacts – photos, PDF’s, CAD files.  Docs now becomes your storage and DR tool.  You can use a range of third party apps to sync with your local folders if you need.

Character by Character collaboration – you can now have up to 50 concurrent editors on a single document.  Imagine a multi national team putting together your annual budget.  No more sending around “Budget_Kathy_Version2″ and trying to get everything into one final document.  Let everyone work together on the same document at the same time.

IM and Presence within Docs – You can now communicate with your collaborators in real time “John, why not change cell C6 to include the new equipment we’re buying?”  Your teams are now working together and improving productivity.

Improved Sharing Settings – Admins and Users now have much greater control over sharing.  The default is private, but you can punch holes through this – you could make your new Product Datasheet public within your domain, so that users could search within their Google Docs interface and up it pops at the speed of lightning.  This is file sharing for the future.

Google Apps Scripts – These enable businesses to create simple scripts for running repetitive tasks saving them time.  Perhaps it is approving holidays, perhaps it is approving purchases of new equipment.  Apps Scripts hives you simple tools to trigger them from any website and can now link into MySQL databases.

Google Wave - Whilst this is still in Labs (Beta), Wave is now available in Google Apps if you wish.  It works really well for small teams collaborating on tasks – perhaps putting a meeting agenda together.

Reset Sign-In Cookies – One of the favourite objections to Cloud is “What about the security of my data?”  Yes, tell me about that laptop you left on the train with all your documents on the hard drive?  The Cloud gives you security you could never get with local storage.  And now Google have a Reset Sign-In Cookie feature so if Bob has lost his laptop, a quick reset and the thief cannot get into the Google Apps account.

Mobile Security – Admins can now enforce security policies on mobile devices, in terms of the complexity of the password and the length.  Google have many more features coming here apparently – secure mobile access is a big focus.  I’m not sure how Blackberry’s and BES features in all this if you can securely access Google Apps from any smart phone.

Migration Tools – Google have migrated over 2 billion emails into Gmail.  Some clients prefer to start afresh, but if you want to transfer your legacy data in then there are migration tools for Outlook, Lotus Notes and Exchange.  They make it extremely simple to migrate and users can be ready to go on Monday morning with all their existing email (which they can now search properly for the first time).

All Google Apps coming to Google Apps – that might not appear to make sense, but all the consumer Google Apps that you love, like Reader, Blogger, YouTube are shortly coming to your Business Google Apps account, so you can access them in one place.  A great result for those who have had issues logging in and out.

Those innovations wrapped up the call.   I’m confident that as businesses start to look at change in a positive light and weigh up this rate of innovation, versus the static Exchange 2003 investment they made, that this has to be the right business decision moving forward.  Yes you might lose your watermark’s in Word, yes you might lose an obscure formula in Excel – but this is a new way of working and I for one am excited to be on the journey with them.

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Chatter – Oooh Aaah, the sexy launch of Salesforce.com’s productivity tool


A few weeks back I was one of thousands logged on to Salesforce.com’s launch of Chatter.  With a few hundred customers and journalists in New York, and almost 2000 viewers online what struck me was how this Company is on the money when it comes to engaging with prospects and customers.  The web interface was awesome – with live Twitter and Facebook streams down one side of the screen, you just logged in and started adding your thoughts.  The quality of the video for a web event was amazing - you felt like you were in the room.

As I logged on, I was greeted by a news reporter building the excitement from the back of the room – you felt like you were about to witness something spectacular.  Whether you believe that what comes next is spectacular or not is one thing – but the delivery is proof in itself that the web is changing the way we do business.  I would encourage you to view some of the past Salesforce.com events, and register for any of their upcoming launches.  Whilst small businesses can’t stretch to these kind of events, we can learn about presentation and delivery.  To quote Marc Benioff “The event is the message.”

Much of Marc’s current rhetoric is around Cloud 2 – the move from traditional websites such as Amazon, ebay and Google, to User Generated Content such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Users want to interact with the web and provide their own content and comment. 

Marc’s original question in 1996 was “Why can’t business software be like Amazon?” but he believes the question has now changed.  “Why can’t business software be like Facebook?”

Instead of software (even cloud software) providing ‘static’ data for users to analyse and work on, why couldn’t it bring together all of the separate interactions of all of the users and mould it into a live newsfeed, just as you get within Facebook?

The best way for you to get a feel for how Chatter achieves this within Salesforce.com, is to view the selection of videos that Salesforce.com post to their YouTube Channel (so few Companies are using this well). You will see how sales people, finance people, support people can all interact on an account, and see a timeline of activity.  Yes this works well for big Enterprise business, but the great thing about the Cloud, is that it is just as effective for a 10 user company – perhaps more so. 

Chatter is an important productivity tool that will be offered at no cost to all Salesforce.com clients.  Anticipated launch dates are by the end of 2010.  For me one of the greatest benefits is that Chatter will be integrated with all Apps developed on the Force.com platform – there are some great videos on the YouTube channel that explore the possibilities.

Footnote:

Marc Benioff recently guest posted on CNN Money.  The article was entitled The End of Microsoft – a door opens to a new cloud.  It is a quick insight into his thinking, and his view of the transformation of the technology industry to a cloud based environment.  More interesting for me though (and hopefully for you too), is the commentary war that breaks out below the post between loyal Microsoft users and the Cloud Cult.

The Cloud has got a long way to go.  But as we used to say in the SaaS Email Security market – “How many people are going in the other direction?”

Did you attend the Chatter launch?  Do you think this is an important change to the Cloud, or a gimick?

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Partnerpedia – How “Facebook for Resellers” helps your IT Business be more productive.


Partnerpedia Logo

Facebook for Resellers

What a great week.  You have selected the technology vendor that best supports your business strategy, you have signed contracts and it’s now a case of getting the relevant product information out to your engineers. 

Your spritely Account Manager at the vendor opens up his laptop, “Now, let me show you our portal where you can get all the relevant information, and log your leads.”

Oh no.  Another portal.

But you already work with 25 other vendors, and they already provide you with 25 other portals.  Rather than distributing the new logins to your team it’s probably best to keep them to yourself, or give them to one ‘portal holder’ who can provide the information out as needed.

The problem is, that your engineers don’t know what they don’t know, and so very little content gets used and engineers have to find their way by trial and error.

The problem of portal overload is just as prevalent for vendors as it is for resellers.  Their marketing team spends hard cash putting together a slick library of current content and marketing tools for you.  But because of the low usage further investment doesn’t appear, and the site becomes outdated and stale, meaning even lower usage from resellers.

But hang on…  When it comes to your personal relationships, with no programming skill at all, and no financial investment, you have been able to run a fantastic website for your friends, including photos, video and streaming news feeds of relevant content.   Facebook has given you the tools that would have previously cost you a huge amount of time and money to develop yourself for free.

How great would that be for a Vendor if you could provide similar functionality for your Resellers.

And how great for Resellers if you could have one site, where you can connect with all 25 vendors, and get the latest, up to date, relevant content.  You could also connect with the individuals at those companies, ensuring you had an accurate contact list should you need urgent assistance.  You could also connect with your peers who also partner with particular vendors and run user groups from within a single portal.

Welcome to Partnerpedia, a site that I think is leading the way in this area.  This is Social Networking for Channels and I think being an early adopter here will help grow your business in comparison to your competitors.

As an individual you set up your personal profile, much as you would on Facebook or LinkedIn.  You can also load up a company profile, as you would do on LinkedIn.  Where LinkedIn leaves off is where Partnerpedia really starts.  As a Vendor you can then add in your partner programmes – perhaps a Referral programme, or a Reseller Programme.  You can then add in relevant content for that programme – marketing documents, sales tools etc.

As a Reseller you then have the ability to connect both with individuals, and with Vendors, and make online requests to join their Partner Programmes.  Vendors can then approve or decline these online applications.

Any user can upload content, perhaps a blog link, a video, a photo, or a Programme Overview, and they can then decide the security of this – either public for all to see, or just for access by those in private collaboration – perhaps those in their Partner Programmes.  It is important to know that security of your material is maintained – you are not losing control by utilising a single site.

As with any Social Networking site – it is only as valuable as the members that use it, and as a Reseller I would recommend that you drive all your vendors to get an Account set up, and to load their expensively created content into the Partner Programmes they create online.  You can encourage them by letting them know that Partnerpedia also includes a CRM Lite functionality that includes lead logging and forecasting tools on top of the fact that the Partnerpedia branded site is free to use (if vendors want they can pay to have the site in their own branding as a private portal). 

A futher feature that I feel is really useful for all tiers in the channel, to help us win business by working together, is  Private Collaborations.  A user can set up a Private Collaboration – essentially a shared workspace, and invite others to join, they can then work together on projects, RFP’s, Account Management – or any other use you can think of.  What is really great is that it’s not just a document library, but comes with version control, and a calendar of changes, so you know that your users are using the correct documents and they can get notified whenever a change is made by another user.  This concept of Resellers and Vendors working together is pretty rare.

I would then recommend you encourage all of your engineers, in fact all of your staff, to set up an account and start connecting with their opposite numbers at all of your vendors.  With the rise of remote working and mobile access of the internet, through one site you can give your team access to all the information they ever needed from all of your vendors.

You will still require a ‘portal holder’ to place orders on vendor specific sites, but for the vast majority of your team this is a great improvement to their productivity.  As more and more companies and individuals join the site, I am confident Partnerpedia will be a well known name within the Channel industry before long.

Have you joined Partnerpedia?  Do you have any comments on what you liked or didn’t like?  What other functionality would you like for Resellers to make it really work for you?

Feel free to connect with myself on the site and start collaborating.

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