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When my boys were young (OK, I am not that old) we would enjoy the championship basketball games on Saturday’s in March (The regional tournaments and the NCAA I mentioned earlier). My boys would ask about the teams, the college, was it a good school? – usual kid stuff. They now know a WHOLE lot more about sports, players, rankings than I do, but that is a topic for another day. The fans did go all out, face painting, screaming dancing getting all excited at the buzzer beater shot. They did it then, we just see and hear about it a lot more now. “March Madness”, “Selection Sunday”

It brings up a few interesting points.

1. Who are the folks actually making decisions about Cloud Strategy? CTO or CFO
2. How much does experience have any impact on the decision making process? (hint: not enough)

So, why is this relevant?

1- We have all been using elements of what is now called “The Cloud” for years (On-demand, ASP, SaaS are all ‘prequels’) IT is not all that different, it just happen a lot faster  - A LOT FASTER

The Cloud and Cloud Computing are terms that can be useful to the informed, and confusing to the less informed. “Cloud” is a bit of a catch-all term  that references;  Grid, Off-site storage, Demand, SaaS, IaaS (Infrastructure), PaaS (Platform) and DaaS  (DataWarehousing). Most of us, have had a Yahoo account and/or LinkedIn account for many years. Then some of use moved to Gmail and now some of us are on Twitter – All would be considered Cloud applications now.

Did someone throw a switch, and suddenly they went from, whatever they were – to Cloud? (Except Twitter, which I would suggest was Cloud from the get go). I doubt it, that does not make sense.

Like any technology, a  good basketball team has a solid foundation and a grounding in the fundamentals of the game. It is also about balance and role players – You can’t put five 7 footers on the court, nor can you put five guards either – it is about balance. A balanced strategy, a balanced product suite and a balanced technology base, no single point of failure.  It goes without saying that during March madness everyone on the court needs to step up their game (Like UVM did in 2005) but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you begin your search for the one perfect product that will solve all your Customer Interaction needs, including such information like SocialCRM and Financial Data, you will not find what you are looking for – period. What you need are the products that ‘play’ nicely with the external systems who have the additional data your business needs.

Next up:

Do we have to reinvent products to keep up with Cloud and CRM 2.0?