Cloudy with a chance of success

The cloud gives unprecedented opportunities for IT to adapt to rapidly shifting business priorities.

It was about eight years ago when I first started grappling with concepts that we now know as cloud computing. I was CIO at Altium, a company specialising in software for electronic engineers. With a high-tech workforce and culture of innovation, 300 staff spread across 15 offices around the world, and 97% export revenue, it was the perfect candidate to become one of the pioneers for cloud.

We had to be able to deliver multigigabyte software updates to 50,000 customers simultaneously. We needed global real-time reporting across different business models, tax systems, buying patterns. Our staff needed to access information globally as they worked on global deals and complex customer issues. We needed a platform for the business systems that would cope with corporate strategic changes. And most importantly, we needed to be able to think about the business direction without having to worry about how the infrastructure would cope with potentially enormous demands: the emerging Internet of Things had scary implications for the amount of data we would potentially have to process.

We were the first company to see Salesforce as a business platform, writing extensive modifications covering almost all aspects of our business, consuming more than two million API calls a day. We were early adopters of Amazon web services and one of the first companies in the region to adopt Google Enterprise. Our finance, project management and case systems were moved to the cloud.

Before all of this, I was always nervous around the end of June, Altium’s financial year end. Altium at the time could do around 8% of the annual sales on the very last day of the year and if the goods weren’t shipped, the revenue didn’t count. Systems needed to support a huge spike, and the pressure each year was enormous. I still remember my first June end after switching to the cloud and the sigh of relief as I was able to sleep knowing that the infrastructure would cope.

I won several awards for moving Altium to the cloud, but I wasn’t satisfied. I would give talks about why other businesses should be adopting these technologies, but the focus was too often on cost and not on the fact that here is a paradigm that enables businesses to focus on what is truly important to them. I have come to understand that what cloud really brings the world is the Freedom to be Remarkable, the Freedom to help a business truly fulfil its potential.

There are several pieces of advice I would like to share for anyone considering the cloud. Firstly, you need to ensure that you know how to get your data out again. It is not sufficient to know in principle, you need to test an actual extraction works in your time frame and provides your data in a usable format. But most importantly, understand that cloud computing can enable you to do things that would otherwise be impracticable.

*Alan Perkins is Director of Technology and Product, Asia Pacific, Rackspace. Previously, Perkins spent more than 10 years at Altium in key leadership roles including seven years as CIO. In 2012, he was named by The Australian as one of the Top 20 people to watch in technology. In 2009, he was a finalist for the IDC Asia Pacific CIO of the Year Award and won an Enterprise Innovation Award for Cloud innovation from IDC.