Posts Tagged ‘communications’

Cloud Computing Is Spurring Worldwide Job Creation

March 9th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

The cloud will have an enormous impact on job creation.  It’s a disruptive technology that will transform the world as we know it.  It will drive down IT costs, foster innovation and create millions of new employment opportunities around the world.

Yep, that’s pretty much what we were thinking last month, when we doubled the size of the AIS Network cloud.   However, this week, new research from industry analyst firm IDC makes it official: 

Spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015. 

And,

IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues.

Researcher John Gantz, senior vice president at IDC, led the study and authored the white paper.  Both were commissioned by Microsoft.  Gantz is  a remarkably knowledgeable and interesting colleague for whom I have great respect.  Since I used to work alongside him on the Business Software Alliance’s worldwide piracy studies (from 2001-2006), I was eager to read his newest findings.  Among them, there was a note on small businesses.  Although small businesses make up the majority of employment in most parts of the world, they are generally less computerized. At the same time, IDC expects small- and medium-size businesses to adopt cloud services faster than large companies, many of which are constrained by existing legacy investments. “So when you put it all together, the two trends balance out, and you get a 50-50 split,” says Gantz.

The study also found that the number of new jobs produced by cloud computing will be somewhat proportional to the size of each industry, but not entirely. In some industries, such as professional services and retail, the high percentage of small- and medium-size businesses will drive up adoption. In other sectors, such as banking, security issues will slow the move to the public cloud, but may increase adoption of private IT cloud services.  Overall, three industries expected to generate the most cloud-related jobs are:

  1. communications and media (2.4 million),
  2. banking (1.4 million), and
  3. discrete manufacturing (1.3 million).

The highest percentage of new jobs will occur in emerging markets, according to the study, especially China and India, which together are expected to produce nearly 6.8 million cloud-enabled jobs between 2011 and 2015. This can partly be attributed to the size of their workforces, and partly to the fact that many Chinese and Indian companies aren’t bound by large legacy system investments. “We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets, but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud,” Gantz says. “They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back.”

Nearly 1.2 million new cloud-related jobs will be created in the U.S. and Canada, according to the IDC study. An early adopter of cloud computing, the U.S. accounted for 62 percent of worldwide spending in public IT cloud services in 2011.

IDC developed its results by analyzing cloud spending trends in more than 40 countries and then using this information to forecast the number of jobs this spending will create.

The Cloud Improves Quality of Life

With these unprecedented opportunities also comes an improved “quality of life” for IT managers.  The cloud is helping companies to be more innovative by freeing up IT managers to work on more mission-critical projects.  To that point, here’s a good snippet from the Microsoft press release:

“We deployed Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune for one of our clients, and the comment we heard from the chief operations officer is that he can actually schedule a meeting with the IT director to talk about strategic applications,” says Carol Reid, sales director for Agile IT, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member headquartered in San Diego, Calif. “Whereas before, the IT director was chasing fires and tending to pretty basic plumbing, he now has the bandwidth to pursue truly strategic projects that move the business forward.”

In addition, many businesses are using the cloud to improve how they work with customers and partners.

“One of the trends we’re seeing is that companies are using cloud-based collaboration software not just for their internal employees, but to engage and share information with partners and vendors,” says Aaron Nettles, co-founder and CEO of Vorsite, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member based in Seattle, Wash. “So it’s really not just about maintaining technology but also about leveraging it to drive revenue for the business.”

To accommodate the growing interest in the cloud, Nettles plans to double the size of his workforce this year. “It seems like a threshold has been crossed where customers are no longer asking, ‘Is the cloud right?’ but ‘When can we get it deployed?’”

Among the enterprises making use of the cloud to boost innovation is Underwriters Laboratories (UL), a global company that provides safety testing and certification for a wide range of product categories. In recent years, the company has acquired several businesses to broaden the services it offers to customers. Because Office 365 frees the company from adding and maintaining new servers, UL has been able to complete its technology integrations very rapidly. Whether it’s a large acquisition in China or a small one in Australia, UL can now integrate new employees within a few weeks instead of several months.

“I didn’t have to staff up with a bunch of contractors or take project managers off other projects,” says Christian Anschuetz, the company’s chief information officer. “And that allowed us to take resources that would otherwise have been needed for our internal integration and focus them instead on growing the business to the benefit of customers. I can’t tell you how much that’s worth.”

Will the cloud be an important force in helping to restore worldwide economic health?  Well, that remains to be seen.  However, from our experience (and apparently that of Microsoft), the cloud is top of mind for CIOs in the U.S. and Canada and, in fact, around the world.  They want to understand how they can use it to grow their companies, and they want to ensure they have the best people (and skills) in place to make it happen.  We at AISN stand ready to help guide them through that educational process.

What’s your view on the new IDC study?  Take a look at the chart below and leave your comments.

Cloud services

Public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide between 2012 and 2015, according to a new study by IDC.

 

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Boosting PR Agency Productivity: Cutting-Edge IT Tools and Cloud Hosting

October 21st, 2011
Posted by: admin

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President, Marketing Communications

I’m hooked on the idea of boosting PR, marketing and advertising agency productivity through unified communications, collaboration platforms and cloud computing.  As a former PR executive specializing in tech PR for a large, global agency and later a DC-based boutique firm, I can see clearly how each of these cutting-edge technologies will provide a tremendous shot in the arm to the public relations, marketing and advertising industries.  In fact, I talked about it in my multi-media presentation, “Unlocking the Business Value of New Technologies,” at the Public Relations Society of America’s 2011 International Conference in Orlando this week.

In this new economy, if you cannot collaborate, you’re toast.  Gone is the super-competitive mentality of the 1990s.  As they adapt to changing markets, clients and employees, PR agencies are finding that they need to evolve from competitive to collaborative cultures.   But to do that, they need to think critically about the IT that they use and how to migrate their company toward more collaborative technologies.

Preferences for communicating change over time and that’s highly evident in this very cool video from Accenture (“Cloud Computing Here and Now – Our Youngest Experts Explain the Cloud”), which I used in introducing my topic at the PRSA 2011 International Conference.  The point is that regardless of whether they’re in the B2B or B2C space, companies that want to compete for customers as well as the newest, best talent must figure out how to get with the times and equip themselves with the technology they need to communicate anywhere, anyplace and anytime.  As communicators, “being social” is no longer just another prerequisite for getting along in our jobs.  Rather, we are currently experiencing a fundamental shift in how we interact with the world, and essentially, in how we get the information that we need in a global marketplace.

The goal of my talk was to allow attendees to walk out of the presentation knowing enough to at least recognize their own business challenges and begin a dialogue with their IT department about how to solve those issues.  To do that:

1)     We explored the most common business challenges in a PR agency today:  remote communications, collaboration and aging, vulnerable servers.  For the benefit of those who requested them, here are links to the videos that I used to illustrate those business challenges:

2)     Next, we surveyed briefly the corresponding IT solutions that are, in fact, transforming the workplace and saving businesses money:  unified communications, collaborative platforms and hosting/ cloud computing.

I recommended Microsoft Lync 2010 (unified communications) and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (collaborative platform), but there are plenty of competitors, whom I also mentioned in my slides.  I demonstrated the value of Lync 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in specific cases (content management, automated workflows, business intelligence, internal networking and more) and used video testimonials from customers to illustrate how these technologies benefit productivity and cut costs:

Then, I offered a brief look at two more detailed case studies: global PR agencies Edelman and Fleishman-Hillard.  I particularly like the Fleishman-Hillard case study because it shows a forward-thinking agency using SharePoint 2010, plus a Web 2.0 application called Newsgator, to build its employee community through very robust, intra-agency social networking.

Following, we looked at a couple of raw video clips (fire in a server closet) and (sprinklers flooding a server room) and discussed how vulnerable these server rooms – or closets, as they may be – are to any number of natural or man-made disasters (not to mention spilled beverages).  I guided attendees through the decision process for kicking their aging servers out of the office and examining other hosting options.

Moving to a professionally managed, hosted environment in a secure data center – whether to a dedicated server environment or a cloud environment – is the way most businesses are going, according to industry analysts.  Industry analyst Gartner, Inc., projects that by next year, a fifth of businesses will not own any IT assets; at least 35 percent of U.S. midmarket businesses (100 to 999 employees) will purchase cloud computing and IT utility services.

What is cloud computing anyway?  For this part of the presentation, “Cloud Computing in Plain English” was a useful video to show.

We examined the benefits and challenges of hosting in-house and outsourcing, after which I answered the questions, “When is on-premise best?” and “When is the cloud best?”  I provided a detailed decision matrix for attendees to share with their IT department.

3)     Finally, we discussed how to measure success/business value, including return on investment (ROI),  return on objective (ROO), increased productivity, increased flexibility/ scalability, more time to focus on business and staff/stakeholder qualitative feedback.

To help PR, marketing and advertising agencies upgrade their IT and move into the 21st century, there are a litany of tools and applications – certainly many more that are specifically designed for enterprise-sized organizations.  Now that the year is drawing to a close, public relations, marketing, advertising and other communications professionals should evaluate seriously the IT tools they will need to communicate, collaborate and engage in the global marketplace next year.  Everybody wins when they use better tools like Lync 2010, SharePoint 2010 and cloud computing.  PR agencies benefit from greater productivity at a cost savings – not to mention happier clients and employees.

If you are in an agency currently, I would be interested in hearing what your agency is doing to address these business challenges.

PRSA, thanks for another great international conference!

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AIS Network to Present “Content Is King” at HostingCon 2011

August 3rd, 2011
Posted by: admin

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President, Marketing Communications

If you have to ask what content marketing is, it’s more than likely that you’re not doing it – or at least, you may not be doing it well.  And, if you are not using compelling content to connect with customers, potential customers and your industry at large, well, then your company may not be realizing its full potential as it competes in the 21st century market.

The rules of marketing have changed – due in large part to social media and the ability to share content.

It’s no longer all about boisterously proclaiming your product’s superiority in so many different ways – or about interrupting your customers repeatedly with advertising or other messages.

Rather, you should recognize that what customers really crave is valuable content that will solve their problems and demonstrate how your product, or service, lives in the world.

Wednesday, August 10 at 3p.m.

Let’s face it.  With the exception of a handful of companies, the hosting sector has never particularly excelled at marketing.

As an industry, we don’t articulate clearly the value proposition of outsourced hosting.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  Now is the time for us, as an industry, to start making the connection between how the latest approaches to creating good content and utilizing social media dovetail to help us in telling our individual and collective stories more clearly.

Next week, in our “Content Is King” session at HostingCon 2011 (the premiere conference for the hosting industry), Carrie Jones of San Diego’s prestigious BaileyGardiner marketing agency and I will explain how getting customers to engage with your company’s expanding body of content is one of the most effective ways in which you can:

  • enhance your company’s credibility and visibility;
  • raise the perception that you are an expert in your industry; and
  • build ongoing loyalty/advocacy for your brand.

Even marketing/communications teams that are on a budget can become effective at content marketing, and we’ll give you some ideas and examples to run with.

I encourage you to learn more.  Join Carrie and me for our “Content Is King” session at HostingCon 2011:  Wednesday, August 10, at 3 p.m. in the San Diego Convention Center.

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Using Web-Based Marketing/PR Tools to Increase Efficiency

October 19th, 2010
Posted by: Laurie Head

Love new tools that will help grow your business and make it more efficient? There is a plethora out there and it’s tough to stay on top of what’s new.

I love tools that create a culture of sharing on a frictionless basis – tools like Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which we host. When paired with a Web 2.0 application such as NewsGator Social Sites, which effectively makes your office “even more social,” SharePoint 2010 can become an incredibly powerful collaboration platform – leading to greater efficiencies in all aspects of the workplace. What communications professional wouldn’t appreciate that?

But, to do my job, I also rely heavily on a number of Web-based tools that lead to even higher marketing/ communications efficiency. For example, I use Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Trends on a regular basis to measure all aspects of our online presence. If you aren’t using these at your company, you should. Also, they’re free.

While attending the international conference for the Public Relations Society of America this week with 3,000 other communications professionals, I learned about dozens more useful tools – most of which are free or available for a small fee. Here are half a dozen that strike me as worth checking out in the coming days:

www.compete.com: Use it for free competitive intelligence that will help you with your online marketing strategy. Compare your Web site’s traffic and engagement metrics with that of another site – a competitor, perhaps.

www.kadoo.com: Simply upload your files once to their cloud and use them on Kadoo.com and/or anywhere else — from mobile and Web applications to Web sites and services. You can do it without sacrificing your right to privacy or file ownership.

www.hootsuite.com and www.postling.com: Need a digital dashboard to monitor social media mentions about your company and spread messages by updating multiple social networks in one step? These sites may be for you.

www.submityourarticle.com: Consider yourself an expert with something to say? Have you considered article marketing? Write an article about almost anything and, for a small fee, get this site to distribute it across the Web to sites that crave content. It’s a 100% automated article distribution service.

www.tweetcloud.com: What’s being said about your company? Use this site for a glimpse across the Twittersphere through an intuitive interface (a cloud).

By the way, if you are tweeting, then please follow us @ AIS_Network.

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