So there you are – working for one of the biggest global Cloud computing brands and you decide to jump ship to a smaller outfit that’s on the up. That’s the story for Simon O’Kane, former UK Managing Director for Salesforce.com, who has just been recruited to Cloud collaboration firm Huddle as Vice President Enterprise.
O’Kane reckons that his move to Huddle comes at a time when the firm is on a comparable mission to Salesforce.com:
“There are lots of similarities with Huddle in what Salesforce had been doing, in terms of challenging the status quo in the ICT world. Salesforce were disruptive in terms of what Siebel, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft had been doing and it is very, very similar at Huddle - challenging people, like Microsoft again, in the government space. ”
That public sector space needs to understand what Cloud Computing can bring to its, he adds:
“We need to share the benefits of Cloud computing with as many people as possible. It is moving very, very quicky. Among government Departments and large enterprises we are growing five fold across most measures. We work with Defra, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Department of Justice, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Cabinet Office. They are adopting Huddle because of the pan-government and shared services agenda that came out of the Gershon review. Huddle allows you to collaborate across boundaries very easily and, importantly, to do it securely; with [Microsoft’s] SharePoint that is much more difficult. ”
Some have suggested that this will involve a major culture change in government which will run up against considerable resistance. O’Kane isn’t so sure:
“From a user point of view there isn’t a big cultural change because Cloud computing allows people to work in the way they do with otherweb-based tools such as Amazon. We bring that ease and simplicity of use into the workplace, but do it in a very secure way. From a management level there is a change: it is a different way of doing technology, and that’s coming from the cost saving pressure of the last few years. We’ve done some work with UK government that has produced stats that show savings of £287m just by moving from SharePoint to Huddle. ”
Coming from Salesforce.com, O’Kane has a particular perspective on the claims and counterclaims of ‘true’ and ‘false’ Clouds:
“Cloud computing is definitely the latest buzzword and all the big vendors have created Cloud offerings. Some of those companies are hardware vendors, which amuses me, others are software vendors: the Microsofts and Oracles. So I say to all our customers they should apply a test. The first question is, ‘Does the offering have any hardware or software cost?’ because if it does, it isn’t Cloud. And then it should be scalable, so that new users can be added instantly rather than after a six-month IT project. You next need to ask, ‘Is it highly available and is user adoption very high?’ Again, what you see is low adoption on some other tools, which is why Huddle has produced a 100% user adoption guarantee. ”
But adoption of Cloud is something that vendors have struggled with. What’s different about Huddle’s approach? O’Kane admits:
"Irrespective of whether it is Cloud or on-premise, in government there is a very long history of low adoption of ‘Cloud’ tools such as Siebel, Oracle and Microsoft I have seen figures that show rates of 30% adoption of SharePoint. We take our cue instead from the consumer Internet, where my seven year old boy can use Amazon to order games without any training; he just needs my creditcard. So to sum up, Cloud computing is a much cheaper alternative to on-premise suppliers and users should focus on true Cloud computing. ”
As well as the UK public sector, Huddle has an interest in the US market with offices in San Francisco. O’Kane explains:
“We are seeing strong traction at the state and city level - the latest is Baltimore - and we are shortly opening up an office on the East Coast. The big thing is security, up-time and the ability to collaborate across boundaries in that market, we’re seeing. If you think of a 500-page document that involves 50 people in five agencies, perhaps linking with the White House, with 20 or 30 working on the document at the same time, then it is pretty difficult to do that with conventional technology: it is a long and very expensive project. People are really becoming familiar with using technology such as Dropbox in the Cloud when they want to do that securely then they turn to Huddle. We see companies like that making a market for us we fully expect to exploit, in both the public and private sectors. ”
