And that’s fantastic news for his existing and future clients at VOIP Pty Ltd. The company is a Telstra Cloud partner and Microsoft Gold partner which combined, ensure a potent cloud solutions offering, which Simon oversees as ICT Services product manager.
But I don’t totally get this whole “cloud” thing, I hear you all desperately say. IT research and advisory firm Gartner defines Cloud Computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet Technologies.
Walt Heuer, general manager at ACT-based Alacrity Technologies said the “cloud” concept was nothing new and had been with us for at least two decades.
“It’s the internet version of a service bureau in the 70s and 80s,” he told WSBA. “Not long ago, the marketing boffins came up with the “cloud” tag and it worked so well, it’s stayed with us ever since.”
And along with prolific use of the tag, there’s been a similar trajectory of growth in the number of self-appointed cloud experts.
Without a formal definition of what constitutes a cloud solution, Simon admits it can be challenging to prospective clients why he’s better equipped to provide advice.
But he’s an accomplished IT boffin – 15 years in IT and more than five of those already in cloud solutions underpin a confidence in his product knowledge that relieves him of any need to disparage competitors.
In fact, he readily acknowledges that competitors such as Google, offer solutions of similar high quality to Microsoft, which he represents. “What we do is before we declare something to be a cloud solution we do have a certain amount of rigour,” Simon explained.
“For us, to be a cloud solution it needs to meet certain criteria.”
Simon said that among those requirements:
• It’s got to be flexible.
• Usually there’s no long term commitment attached to it.
• It’s usually involves a per user, per month fee.
• It should be useful or of some value to an organisation.
“Just a website in itself, is not ‘cloud’ because it doesn’t provide any kind of business value to the people using it,” he explains. “But if you’re talking about something like Office 365 providing an email address, that’s business value.”
His main weapons include Microsoft’s Office 365 suite for communications and Telstra’s T-suite covering HR, accountancy, project management and customer relationship management.
“The reason why I like cloud solutions is because it actually got me from crawling out from under desks and having arguments with the users, to actually be able to have a normal discussion with people and get them to like IT,” he said.
But he’s not in denial when it comes to the ability of discussion about the cloud to put an audience to sleep.
In presentations to business people, one way he likes to keep his presentation enjoyable is to launch into a discussion on the phenomenon of the IT worker and why they are mostly grumpy.
He explains that it’s all to do with having to crawl under desks, put up with entanglement in cabling and hide in dark, dingy rooms at the back of or underneath the office.
I couldn’t help thinking that the idea of companies switching to cloud solutions must be making those IT workers even grumpier by threatening their jobs, but Simon doesn’t believe that’s necessarily the case.
He believes the cloud has the potential to take skilled IT workers away from menial, time-consuming tasks to focus on areas that will increase an organisation’s productivity and functionality.
“The cloud is good for your company because you can focus on your business and not waste time trying to get things to work – they just work,” Simon said.
“It’s also good because you can finally use proper IT solutions, not the half IT solutions that have been half installed by yourself or your neighbour’s son.
“And you get the absolute latest-available versions of the best-available products sold in the stores at their best capability, installed by the best experts in the world and a premium standard of security for a fraction of what you would expect to pay.”
