Making the world safe for public sector Cloud Computing

“We're an old fashioned business in many ways,” declares Salesforce.com's Dan Burton. “We're not rattling a lot of cages.”

 

It's an unexpected tack to hear from someone who represents a company that has specialised in rattling cages in the traditional software industry. But Burton's role as head of global public policy for Salesforce.com means he's dealing with public sector organisations that have to date embraced Cloud Computing more cautiously than their private sector counterparts. 

 

“Certainly people have been slower to adopt Cloud Computing in the public sector he admits. “For example, we were very successful in the SME space, but the major enterprises would say 'we'll never use Cloud Computing because we have higher security and privacy requirements' and so on. Then some of the multinationals started to use it. Then we had the banks saying that they couldn't use Cloud Computing because their security requirements are far too tight. Then the banks started to use it. 

 

“Now we are starting to see the same comments from the public sector: 'Cloud Computing is great for the private sector, but not for us...'. But half of all the US Cabinet agencies are running Salesforce.com. There are government examples in the UK and France and around Europe. It has taken root. What we seeing is a lot government agencies running pilots of 50 – 100 user subscriptions.”

 

 

Burton sees his role as being to “make the world safe for Cloud Computing” and in this way encourage greater public sector take-up. “The way to look at this that the internet business mode works well when there's a free flow of data. If you have an environment where data can't flow easily, then it doesn't work, so that raises issues such as cross border data flow and security,” he explains. 

 

“We operate in accordance with European Union Safe Harbour,” he says. “We certify that our organisation operates in accordance with the European Data Directive. But you can run into circumstances with particular countries or business sectors where data can't be allowed to leave the country. For example, Swiss banking regulations where it becomes a much more complex environment in which to operate.”

 

Burton has some sympathy with the insistence of some organisations and governments that data does not leave national boundaries. “There are certain data sets that are top secret,” he acknowledges. “Governments will insist that they are kept not only within the national borders, but also in private Clouds behind government firewalls. But there are also huge data sets that do not fall into that category. The key issue when determining risk is not the data's location, it's the security, performance, cost and customisation and so on that the organisation requires."

 

 

The proof of the pudding is, as ever, in the eating and one thing that Burton is keen to emphasise is the need to get away from theoretical discussions about Cloud's potential and to grasp real world examples.  “A lot of policy discussion about Cloud Computing are actually hypothetical and quite generic, such as 'it's not secure' or 'you don't know where your data is',” he says. “Really the most important thing to advance public policy decisions is to get governments and government bodies to use it. Once governments get on the Cloud Computing curve, then they realise that Salesforce.com has a tier one data centre and then they realise that the Salesforce.com data model is very different from a Facebook or a Twitter model.”

 

Salesforce.com is heavily embedded in the US governmment's push towards Cloud Computing as part of the Apps.gov storefront for public sector Cloud technologies. “When they were setting Apps.gov up, they looked at our App Exchange,” says Burton. “It's fundamentally modelled on what we did at Salesforce.com. It was a great roll out. It was announced in September last year and at that point we had over 100 products listed on it. There were many of the traditional mega-software companies with no apps listed whatsoever. As more and more companies get listed on Apps.gov, it further validates our model.”

 

One of those 'validating' companies is set to be Microsoft, which has recently made a significant push into the Federal Cloud space, fuelled perhaps by some of the high profile successes enjoyed by Google in the sector. “Really we see Microsoft as being a very positive entry into the Cloud market,” insists Burton. “We are ready for more competition. We can compete effectively. What is interesting to us is that the marketing mantra of 'software plus services' has vapourised. So we now have to let the market decide.”

 

With traditional on premise public sector IT projects there has been – for better or worse – a significant dependence on management consultancies and third party systems integrators. Such organisations will still have their part to play in a Cloud-based future, reckons Burton, although quite what form that role will take remains to be seen. 

 

“I was on a panel a few weeks ago and there were systems integrators who gave a very clear description of the quandry that they are in,” he recalls. “They said they used to understand the software industry. There was software and there was services and that was understood. But they haven't worked out how the new model works yet because it pushes the services side up the value chain. Systems integrators aren't going to be writing tons of code in the future so they are going to have to find other types of value-add and we just don't quite now what the business model is for that yet.”

 

With a general election looming in the UK, Burton sees a clear role for UK political parties to use Cloud Computing in the pre and immediate post election period. “Look at the model of electoral campaigning,” he says. “If you are a political campaign, you have little technical expertise and a tight budget. You are going to ramp up your campaign then you are going to shut it down. We can take our standard sales templates and modify them to handle campaigning, fund raising and so on."

 

 

A prime example of the post-election capabilities of Cloud Computing can be seen in the Obama administration's Change.gov offering which 'crowd sourced' priorities from the electorate for the new government in Washington. “We started talking to the Obama team about how to pull in public ideas about what to do in government,” recalls Burton. “They wanted to be able to pull in the public and engage people with policies. We had already deployed IdeaStorm for Dell in the private sector and so we talked to the Obama transition team about running an experiment with that.”

 

The idea was to run the site for a week prior to the Presidential inauguration, but an immediate issue was how many users the site would have to be able to handle. The initial estimate was for 5000. This number was then ramped up to 10,000. Salesforce.com decided it should be set up for an unlimited number -which proved to be just as well. 

 

“We started the experiment at the weekend,” says Burton. “For the first couple of days we deliberately didn't make any press announcements about it. Then the traffic started. At first it had a pretty low volume, then on the Wednesday night the transition team went onto the blogosphere and then the traffic shot up. By the time we shut the site down, there had been 1.4 million votes on 52,000 ideas, based on 39 million hits. That's proof I think that the Cloud works in terms engaging the public as well as being very powerful in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness.”

 

Burton's advice to all government agencies and organisations looking at Cloud Computing is simple: tap into experience. “Talk to your peers,” he recommends. “Talk to an agency which has Cloud applications in place and talk to them about usage, performance, scalability and so on. You also need to find an application that meets your specific needs.