Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For IBM, a $500 million to $2 billion is probably not as interesting as a client. For you, it is interesting.

Sean Donaldson: We’ve had some opportunities winning some very large clients from them. In one case, a customer was with IBM and after six months of trying to get a particular system set up, they came to us and said that they had to have it up by the end of the year. We had about 30 systems up for them before the end of the year and they could close the books. With IBM, it took them literally six months and they hadn’t got that far.

Scott McIsaac: We have the ability, with our size, to be a lot more flexible and nimble. We can build a solution that is more customized to what a customer wants, because we don’t have that rigid process for coming up with a new product offering or some specific service to sell to this client. We have the ability to adopt and move a lot faster than an IBM-type of company.

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about a variety of different ERP systems that you support. You obviously have a bunch of different ERP systems and you compete against some smaller vendors who are more niche. What is involved in supporting a particular ERP system that complicated? What are the specifics and nuances of supporting specific different ERP systems?

Sean Donaldson: When we compete against people who specialize in a particular application set, the reality of the customer landscape is they have a number of different systems that are interconnecting and working together. They maybe having business analytics systems that work with their ERP system to do business analytics based on their ERP sales, manufacturing, or product lifetime management. When you look at one of the specific companies that specialize in one of those areas, we have that same specialization. We just have it simply as one team within our organization.

Scott McIsaac: If you look at some of our specialization, SAP is a great example. We went out and got the certification from the vendor to become a certified SAP hosting provider. We’ll do that with the Oracle stack. We make sure that the teams go down that specialization track and we become a certified vendor for a lot of these technologies.

Sean Donaldson: With SAP, it comes down to a couple of different things. It comes down to building a team with experience and partnering very closely with SAP. As Scott was mentioning, SAP has a lot of very specific hosting provider certification paths.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson
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