We all do business in the cloud, yet two key questions need to be continuously brought up, reviewed and discussed: 1) What are the practical next steps to further your company’s presence in the cloud? and 2) How best can you work efficiently and effectively for your company using cloud technologies? The answers to these questions are to first and foremost look to maximizing your Salesforce CRM investment.

Learn more about Salesforce and engage with the salesforce community to learn what others are doing. Second, look for apps and cloud solutions that meet your specific needs. Is your current expense tracking system cumbersome? Would a more accessible documentation management solution or an electronic signature solution help to streamline and manage your groups contracts? Chances are whatever your need is, there is a cloud solution that can be integrated into your salesforce org.

Third, use Salesforce as the “glue” for these apps and solutions. Reviewing your organization’s business processes from a Quote to Cash perspective, you will find very quickly that there are many solutions in the market that can be integrated with Salesforce. The result: In a short time, you can improve your Quote to Cash process and build a solution using best-of-breed cloud apps.

(This posting is a recap of our presentation at the Chicago Salesforce Usergroup meeting in March 2012)

CHICAGO- Feb 2012- On Thursday, February 16, Delivered Innovation co-hosted “State of the Cloud 2012: What Business Executives Need to Know” at the Illinois Technology Association. The event had over 70 registrants, with professionals ranging from companies such as Google and Motorola to mid-market SMEs such as First Communications and Hexistor.

The presenters included Brad Desent of Apex Consulting, Chris Kabat of MPS Partners, and Michael Topalovich, CTO of Delivered Innovation. Topics of conversation centered around old cloud vs. new cloud discussions, leading cloud offerings (PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS), and which cloud applications are useful in running your business, such as Remember the Milk, Google Docs, and Quickbooks.

Justin Hartung, Enterprise Deployment Manager at Google, stated that the turnout of the event, “shows how much the cloud has grown, and how important it is for businesses today to educate themselves on cloud benefits.”

Russell Pease, Strategic Accounts at Windstream, shared his thoughts, “the event was great; it’s interesting to see so many industry experts participate in a cloud discussion and give their own definition of cloud computing since everyone’s is slightly different.”

For a full review of the event, read Delivered Innovation’s blog.

More about Delivered Innovation
Founded in 2006, Delivered Innovation (DI) designs and develops on-demand SaaS business applications. Utilizing leading cloud computing technologies and leveraging strategic partnerships, DI helps clients address complex business challenges and create revenue opportunities by automating business processes, extending the functionality of existing CRM enterprise systems, and introducing new business capabilities within Salesforce.

DI understands the critical nature of getting services to market quickly in order to capture first-mover advantages. Additionally, DI understands that it is just as important for services to be well-designed, highly functional, and high performing in order to drive rapid adoption and growth. With DI’s innovative approach to SaaS application and design, they have completed over 125 successful projects, ranging from innovative startups to global 500 companies.

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Media Contact
Jessica Buhrman | Social Marketing Manager | jbuhrman/deliveredinnovation.com

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This week, Delivered Innovation co-hosted an event at the ITA, “State of the Cloud: What Business Executives Need to Know.” The presenters included Brad Desent of Apex Consulting, Chris Kabat of MPS Partners, and our own CTO, Mike Topalovich. We were impressed by the outcome of the event, and received positive feedback from our attendees. If you would like the run down of the event, click the link below. Thank you to everyone who attended!

• State of the Cloud Event Recap

Salesforce.com recently announced an alliance with Deloitte, one of the largest consulting firms in the world. The goal of the alliance is to provide, “multinational companies with software, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the social enterprise.” Deloitte can also help salesforce.com increase their presence in the cloud computing market share by having access to Deloitte’s large customer base, comprised mainly of large enterprises. Deloitte’s customers are looking to “work more effectively and more efficiently,” and the possibilities with cloud computing and Salesforce might just be the key.

• Salesforce.com to Widen Cloud Computing Reach with Deloitte Partnership

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State of the Cloud 2012 was a full house, with attendance ranging from professionals at Google and Motorola, to SMEs such as First Communications and Hexistor. Our three presenters, Brad DeSent from Apex Consulting Group; Chris Kabat from MPS Partners; and Delivered Innovation’s own Michael Topalovich, spoke on leading cloud capabilities.

In response to the event, Justin Hartung, Enterprise Deployment Manager at Google, stated that the turnout of the event “shows how much the cloud has grown,” and how important it is for businesses today to educate themselves on cloud benefits. Russ Pease, Strategic Accounts at Windstream, shared his thoughts, “the event was great; it’s interesting to see so many industry experts participate in a cloud discussion and give their own definition of cloud computing since everyone’s is slightly different.”

We were very excited about the turnout of the event, and would like to share with you what we learned:

Brad DeSent was the first to take the stage and presented on the old vs. new in cloud computing. Old news- cloud computing discussions were centered around public vs. private clouds, what the difference is between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and what essential characteristics such as on-demand service and resource pooling that the cloud provides. Today, discussions circle around topics of mobility due to releases in tablets, smart phones, and mobile apps, security and backup for cloud services, and “cloud by default” deployments in offices, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office, and Google Docs.

Chris Kabat helped bring to light our understanding of PaaS, IaaS, and storage as a service. A couple big players in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are Google and Amazon EC2; in Platform as a Service (PaaS) there are Amazon, Windows Azure, Force.com, and Google; in Storage as a Service (which is a relatively new term), there are Dropbox, Google, and Rackspace, to name a few. Each of these players have unique offerings to consumers, and when exploring cloud possibilities, it is important to investigate and compare options.

Some interesting statistics:

• 72% of professionals feel more positive about cloud computing than they did 1 year ago

• Cloud computing is predicted to stay in progressive growth mode, with 53% of professionals wanting more clarity around cloud offerings, and 47% wanting more clarity around deployments.

Lastly, our CTO took the stage. Running 100% in the cloud for the past two years, Mike Topalovich gave a run down of the cloud applications that Delivered Innovation uses on a daily basis. Topalovich gave us a quick demo of Evernote for note taking and web clipping, Remember the Milk for task management, Quickbooks for finance management, and Google Docs for document and project collaboration. With these tools, Delivered Innovation has been able to more effectively run our business, making accessibility to information quicker and easier than ever before. Some other applications to consider for your business are Dropbox for storage, Expensify for expense management, DocVerify for document management, Basecamp for project management, and ZenDesk for an online help desk.

With so many cloud applications, there comes an issue with integration- how can you integrate one application with another? Better yet, how can you integrate five applications into one? Topalovich answered this question by stating that applications can be integrated into PaaS services, such as the Force.com platform. That allows for the application to be integrated into a SaaS environment, in this example it would be Salesforce. The added benefit being paying a one time fee for integration and customization, then having it available for full usage. This cuts down on management of different cloud applications, as you could manage them in one place, in one dashboard.

Thank you to everyone who attended our event, we enjoyed your feedback and look forward to seeing you again soon! If you have any further questions or comments about this event, please comment below, or email me at jbuhrman/deliveredinnovation.com.

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