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Business leaders explain what the benefits of cloud computing have been for their organisations.

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Transcript

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF CLOUD COMPUTING?
 
Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UK Sailing Academy
The benefits of cloud computing for us have been manifold. We’ve seen a reduction in costs, both for the actual cost of the applications that we’re running and also a reduction in the implementation costs of those applications. We’ve also seen quite a big and significant reduction in the cost of hardware to actually run the business applications that we use.
 
Jonathan Waddingham, charity champion at Justgiving.com
For us the benefits of cloud computing have been that we’ve been able to access our client lists and all the information about our clients through the internet and don’t have to log into any installed software on our own PCs. It’s very easy to set up new members of the team and get them accessing the data that they need to access.
 
Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UK Sailing Academy
The whole – I guess the great thing is that all these applications that we’re using within the company play really nicely together without me having to invest large sums of money and lots of IT headaches. They’re just kind of out of the box. They work and play nicely together and that’s really, really added to the benefit.
 
Mark Orsborn, marketing manager at Oasis Medical Solutions
It’s absolutely vital that I don’t have to manage support to maintain the cloud applications because there’s only me. I have no internal IT team, our teams are totally focused on the customer and the software we provide. So what I needed was a solution I could rapidly develop and evolve in line with the business process and the changes I needed to implement to help the business grow, but without any of the hassle of having to have servers on site and knowing what software to patch and all the lovely things that come with server management. So it’s absolutely pivotal to why I needed Sales Force and the cloud.
 
Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UK Sailing Academy
Obviously with cloud computing we don’t need to manage, maintain, and install new upgrades. It’s all done for us. And it’s one of the real sharp benefits that you get from moving to these systems. I love the fact that I have a whole army of users worldwide who are coming up with new and better ways, new and better systems to implement. The providers of these services really do listen to their users and implement and turn around those new features very, very quickly. So I get new features regularly without any installation costs, without actually even having to ask for them. I’ve got all these people looking for new ways to make my business sharper and better. And that’s a huge benefit and a huge weight off my mind.
 
Mark Orsborn, marketing manager at Oasis Medical Solutions
Compared to having worked in enterprise CRM environment where I was bombarded by calls and issues, it’s been an absolute dream.
 
Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UK Sailing Academy
As a charity, the last thing I should really be doing is spending lots of time and money managing my IT applications. And again, that’s another big benefit for us as a charity moving on to cloud platforms. We’re able to focus our attention on the people that actually need our help, rather than getting bogged down in kind of detail and systems and implementation of it. It’s kind of all there, taken care of and that in itself has been a big return on the investment we have made.
 
Jonathan Waddingham, charity champion at Justgiving.com
It’s very important for us that we don’t have to support the Sales Force application. I mean I’m a system administrator for Sales Force, but I’m not a techie. I can add fields and manipulate all of the data fields in Sales Force very easily having done some Sales Force online training using their web when I was in the help section. It’s very for all of us to do without having to go through any technical people, and that’s really important. It makes us more agile.
 
IS CLOUD COMPUTING RIGHT FOR TIMES LIKE THESE?
 
Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UK Sailing Academy
As a charitable organisation, we’ve never had huge IT budgets. And I think – I mean inevitably the current economic climate has focused us not just on our IT budgets and costs, but on all of our budgets and costs. And I’m very, very glad that we’ve started the whole route down the use of cloud computing, because it’s enabling us to contain those costs despite having an increasing reliance on these various systems that we have. We’re still able to keep those costs down and that’s never been my experience with traditional software systems.
 
Mark Orsborn, marketing manager at Oasis Medical Solutions
I think the current economic climate has validated the reason why we bought into the cloud and changed our IT approach. We never wanted onsite software or hardware. We needed a solution that was scalable, robust, easy to manage, and extremely cost effective.