Cloud Computing: Email shows the way

September 8th 2014

John Bergin recently spoke to Leslie Faughnan regarding cloud computing.  The following article was published in the Sunday Business Post Connected Magazine on the 7th of September. 

Leslie Faughnan reports,

All of our interviewees described an Irish cloud market in which their clients and prospects broadly understand the potential value of cloud computing and its inevitability as their next generation of business systems delivery. The assessment and sales conversations tend to go immediately to practical, even nitty-gritty questions of specifically what it would be useful or possible to move to a cloud service.

With prospects that have done little or nothing so far, an almost-universal solution today appears to be the movement of email and other collaboration applications to a cloud service. Microsoft Office 365 appears to be becoming as ubiquitous as its traditional desktop version once was. Similarly, back-up and business continuity solutions are largely moving online in the general market.

IT Force is a well-known ICT company that has been in the market for 15 years and now specialises in managed services, including cloud solutions. Managing director John Bergin is a strong believer that the client discussions are and should be about the business and its activities and strategy and needs.

'IT is there to support the business and today any moves to cloud are likely to be from a business impetus, an opportunity or a problem. Flexibility is often the key in either case and that is certainly a major characteristic of cloud solutions. So the constantly increasing demand for mobile functionality, for example, can be better served and easily upgraded as required. In every sense computing should follow people and not the other way round.

In that context, Bergin said, his company has been seeing unified communications really coming into its own, seamlessly merging voice and data and collaboration. 'It is the business possibilities that are opened up that are almost dramatic, like person-to-person videoconferencing from a downtown coffee shop.

Clients are increasingly opting for managed services, he said, because of the attractiveness of total support for a fixed fee. 'We provide the kit, the software and the management. But there is also the business flexibility, and not just in scaling up. If you have to let a couple of employees go, then the licensing and support and so on also comes off the overhead. You may add a number of temporary employees seasonally and you know exactly what the added costs will be. I keep using flexibility as the key word, but remember it is flexible business solutions that count, not flexible IT.

Cloud is a tech enabler for that flexibility and a good service provider will always keep the focus on how to maximise that from the business point of view. 'In a real sense the techy bits belong behind the scenes. On the other hand, the costs of ICT kit have come down so much that very often a client will say to us: Never mind what we currently have. In the light of where we have agreed to go, what should we invest in and what's the best?' And in turn that often means that we can point to areas of significant cost savings for the future, said Bergin.