Cloud computing commuters and the future of London

There may be another migration of London workers away from the centre, but this time they won’t be commuting back by omnibus as in Victorian times. With revenues down, London firms will survive by mimicking startups, cutting fewer jobs and reducing overheads by computing and commuting in the cloud.

See the latest muon cloud blog postfrom Mark Williams, Head of Information Systems and Services at Extrasys.

The Force is strong in Cloud City

Cloud computing is certainly being taken seriously by big enterprises now, and Salesforce.com are marketing their Force.com software platform to them with a vengeance; but is their technology any good? Mark Williams, Extrasys Head of Information Systems and Services, reports on his muon cloud blog from a round table forum at the City’s tallest building, Tower 42.

UK cloud commuters crack on as snow falls

As South-east England has the worst snow it has seen for 18 years, Mark Williams, Extrasys’s Head of Information Systems and Services, carries on business as usual from his home using Extrasys’s Windows-based cloud computing platform. Read his account on muon cloud.

Cultivating Cloud Computing Business: “Shut up and listen” (Part 1)

When the concept of “Hosted IT services” and “Software as a Service” first appeared, many thought the market would explode as a new era of application delivery was born.  In reality, the growth of this particular sector of “Cloud Computing” has been slow.  It has only been in the last 12 months that demand for Hosted IT has really increased.

Extrasys, now in its fifth year of operations, has always been one of the main players in the UK Hosted IT services market.  The Extrasys service is certainly a fantastic cloud computing product.  Our client base still has the same basic business needs and drivers they did five years ago.  So why did the market take so long to develop?  Perhaps one of the most significant factors was effective communication. 

Educating Joe

Hosted IT services have taken a plethora of different names over the years.  Cloud computing, software as a service, application service provider, hosted IT, hosted desktop… the list goes on.  The sheer number of different solutions and the never-ending list of potential benefits seemed to overwhelm Joe Average, who was only to happy to “stick with what I know”.  It now seems we are entering a period of consolidation, however.  Joe’s starting to pick things up – he suddenly seems more familiar with the terms and the impact that such services can have on his business. 

This can be credited in no small part to the emergence of the big kids in the playground (such as Google Apps).  But Extrasys had learned a valuable lesson.  Extrasys have been delivering a reliable service for a number of years.  Everything was spot on technically, but it was important that we were able to effectively communicate the value that hosted IT services can provide, to educate the market place as a whole.  This was where the challenge lay.

Educating Extrasys

Over the past nine months, Extrasys have enlisted the skills and experience of a sales consultancy company.  Under their guidance, our company’s sales & marketing strategies and operations have been improved significantly. 

The consultants have acted as a sales director, mentor, and coach.  As a consequence, the number of real monthly opportunities has escalated and our lead generation campaigns have become slicker and more focussed.  What’s the secret?  It isn’t rocket science.  It isn’t some form of black magic.  It’s the “consultative sales process”.

Listen and Learn

Stop banging on about the benefits of cloud computing.  Rather than trying to make someone buy your product or service, consultative sales involves listening to the client’s problems.  It’s about analysing the client’s business drivers and needs, assessing their constraints and making a recommendation based on those needs.  It’s all about adding value for the client; taking them by the hand and helping them through their decision process.  It’s about clarity of thought, insightful questioning and, above all, listening to the customer.

Until recently, I had little or no experience in sales and have found the past few months a considerably steep learning curve.  Over the coming weeks I’ll reflect on the progress we’ve made and try to summarise the key lessons learned.

Cloud computing market size forecasts

Is Cloud Computing a storm in a marketing teacup or will it go the way of the last ‘next big thing’? Is it here to stay and how big will the market become within the next 3 years? Mark Williams, Extrasys’s Head of Information Systems and Services, does a bit of research and reveals his findings in his muon cloud blog

Amazon Web Services is changing its business model

Michal Pawlowski, Extrasys’s Senior Software Developer, reports on the new Amazon Web Services Management Console. Amazon, it seems, are now cutting out the middle men who have made a business from selling user interfaces to their Elastic Computing Cloud. See Michal’s ITsudo blog for details.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is finally 20ms away

Michal Pawlowski, Extrasys’s Senior Software Developer, reports in his ITsudo blog on the European launch of Amazon’s EC2 service, and he details the measurements he made that show the significant reductions in latency that come with using servers based in Europe rather than the United States.

Silver lining the computing cloud for Softcat

Softcat’s Dave Simpson says that “cloud computing is the business to be in” and Mark Williams, Extrasys’s Head of Information Systems and Services, couldn’t agree more, saying in his muon cloud blog that “software license providers are realising too that hosted pay-per-use IT services are becoming more and more popular with businesses, especially in the current economic climate”.

UML – why use it?

In his ITsudo blog Michal Pawlowski, Extrasys’s Senior Software Developer, explains why the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is such a useful and popular tool in a software developer’s toolbox.

Cloud Computing calls in the Credit Crunch

Mark Williams, Head of Information Systems and Services at Extrasys, asserts in his muon cloud blog that the current global economic crisis will lead to widespread adoption of cloud computing technologies in the next few years. Scaleable, pay-as-you-go, hosted IT services are suddenly more attractive in these uncertain times for businesses