First of all, hats off to Johna Till Johnson and her article this morning in Network World entitled “Cloud computing: The telcos’ game to lose“. In addition to helping all of us understand the role that traditional Telco’s play in offering cloud computing services, she breaks down cloud computing into 3 basic areas:

1. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

2. Platform-as-a-Service

3. Infrastructure-as-a-Service

My goal today is not to dig into the differences of these 3 categories of cloud computing (a good future topic), but to simply ask if cloud computing has impacted you lately – either positively or negatively. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Telizent’s service offering to intelligently monitor and maintain business communication systems (Monitor+) is accomplished largely through cloud computing. Using Johna’s definition above, we’d likely be categorized as a SaaS offering, and 95% of the time we are able to remotely resolve any alarm / problem that is identified by Monitor+ using our SaaS toolset.

But what about our internal use of cloud computing? We actually try to walk the talk. About a year and a half ago, we were searching for an easy-to-use project management tool that we could use to manage some of our telecom projects. Microsoft Excel was not interactive and Microsoft Project was too complex and too expensive. After a little research we discovered a SaaS Project Management tool called Clarizen and we haven’t looked back. It enables us to manage projects across multiple locations, clients and users via the web, without having to load anything on a project member’s machine… in fact much of the interaction is done right from their email inbox!

On the bumpier side of the equation, about a year ago we began using Microsoft’s Office Live CRM tool to track our web inquiries and manage our opportunity pipeline. All was going well until one morning (about two months ago) we woke up to find that the “create new opportunity” function in Office Live was no longer working after a new release the night before.

After 6 weeks of submitting several requests to their message board (they have no direct support phone number any longer) and not getting any resolution, I had to find an alternative option for our organization. So far we’re very pleased with our new CRM solution from Tigerpaw Software. However it is with some chagrin that I share with you as I write this blog entry that I decided to check one last time to see if Microsoft had resolved the Office Live issue without notifying me… you guessed it, the “create new opportunity” feature is now functioning again.

Just keeping it real. Cloud computing is of tremendous value to businesses, but there are some risks that we each need to plan for accordingly. What are your experiences with Cloud Computing? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.