Hearing from "Accidental Cloud Leaders" at the Cloud Leadership Summit

One of the highlights of last week's "Cloud Leadership Summit" (which I started to cover in Tuesday's post) was the opportunity to hear from leading practitioners of cloud computing-- CIOs who have made big bets on the cloud.  

When you think of the type of companies that are moving their IT aggressively in the cloud, you probably don't picture companies like Brady or RehabCare.  Brady is a $1.5B global manufacturer of safety and identification products, based in Milwaukee. RehabCare is a 13,000 person provider in the highly regulated healthcare industry, based in St. Louis.  Both are 2,000 miles from Silicon Valley, the headquarters of the companies they've chosen as their core cloud platforms.

Brady even refers to itself as an "accidental cloud leader" in a recent article they penned for Network World.  "We moved to the cloud out of business necessity," said Bentley Curran, Brady's CIO:

We were on a heavy acquisition trail, and had to integrate. We looked at the old traditional way with servers and software, but had to go much faster.  It had to be scalable, and it had to be predictable from a cost perspective for IT. Salesforce was the first one-- we wanted access to the pipeline of the businesses we were acquiring.  The we went after email and HR-- you want to be able to communicate and collaborate with your acquisitions as quickly as you can.

Four years and 30 acquisitions later, Brady runs their communication and collaboration on Google Apps, their CRM on Salesforce.com, and their HR on Workday... all tightly integrated to their core SAP financial applications.

For RehabCare, on the other hand, mobility was the driving force to cloud computing. "Rehabcare's 13,000 employees are almost all mobile-- only 300 work in corporate," says Dick Escue, RehabCare's CIO. "Our nurses, our therapists-- when they're doing their job, they're not at their desk.  Anything we do in IT, whether we build it or whether we buy it, needs to be mobile."

When one of Dick's .NET developers was able to automate one of RehabCare's manual processes using Force.com in a single week-- and run that app from an iPhone-- RehabCare was hooked.  "When our CEO saw what we could do with platform as a service and saw it on the device that everyone wanted to use-- it's no exaggeration, it transformed our company."

Of course, both Brady and RehabCare have had to overcome significant challenges as they've moved more and more of their business to the cloud.  Brady has had to overcome the challenge of delivering business information to global user base in an effective way. 

"Watching them work, I could tell they were struggling," says Suzanne Serwe, Senior Business Analyst at Brady. "Our users still had to login, and go to each application, and work in that application.  We asked how we could serve up the information in all these systems in a way that's intuitive, before they even know they want it. We wanted to give people the information they need in the environment where they work.  We didn't want to tell people where they had to get things done."

RehabCare has had to overcome the challenges of making the cloud work in a highly regulated environment.  Dick argues "There are a lot of myths out there-- people think you can't work with Google, can't work with Apple.  They think 'you can't be HIPAA compliant in the cloud.'  That's not true.  You can-- you just have to have your act together. We're super-focused on security and compliance."

So what comes next for these cloud innovators?

For Brady, the focus continues to be on using information to make users more effective.  

"Our cloud applications allow us to move much much faster," says Bentley.  "We need to take advantage of the foundation we've laid in the cloud, so we can start to surface information that allows managers to make decisions faster."

RehabCare hopes to use their cloud platforms to transform their entire business:

We're a service provider in some very mature business lines.  We're asking how we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors.  Its our belief that these technology solutions will help us do that.  The key is the speed with which we can move, because we're cloud-based.   Its not just a growth strategy, its the transformation of our company.

Business transformation, better business decisions-- these are concepts that we don't hear enough about in our industry's dialog about the shift to cloud computing. Looking forward to continuing the conversation with leading cloud practitioners like Bentley and Dick... "accidental leaders" or not!

Ryan Nichols is the Vice President of Cloudsourcing and Cloud Strategy for Appirio.