1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Domain Knowledge

At 1Mby1M, we believe in learning from case studies of successful entrepreneurs. These case studies involve discussions on opportunities and challenges specific to the domain such as Generative AI, E-Commerce, Digital Health, Cyber Security, and FinTech. 

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Blackbaud CTO Mary Beth Westmoreland (Part 1)

Blackbaud is a SaaS company that caters to the philanthropic segment—helping non-profits manage their donor management workflows. This interview explores the trends and evolutions of the sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Blackbaud and yourself.

Mary Beth Westmoreland: I’m Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Product Development at Blackbaud. Blackbaud has actually been around for quite some time. We’re the leading provider of software and services for the global philanthropic community. A big chunk of that is the non-profit space. We’ve grown our customer base by about 15% and our stock price by about 70% over the past two years. We’re a growing company. We serve more than 35,000 customers today in the philanthropic space and also the consumers. >>>

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Everbridge CEO Jaime Ellertson (Part 1)

If the Brussels attacks have made you wonder about alert systems and such, this discussion will shed some light.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Everbridge.

Jaime Ellertson: I’m the Chairman and CEO of Everbridge. Everbridge is a provider of enterprise SaaS applications that automate information exchange to keep people safe and business running. It is a fast-growing provider of enterprise SaaS applications that automate information exchange to keep people safe and businesses running.

The markets that we participate in are everything from emergency notification, which would be sending out communications like recently in Brussels, to communications and information exchange around IT outages. It could also be a connected hospitals – code alerts and telemedicine – or large community >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 1)

There’s a significant trend in the cloud services space towards managed services. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as dinCloud.

Ali Din: I run a company by the name of dinCloud, which is a cloud services provider. I’ve been in the IT channel or IT industry for just shy of 20 years now. I’ve been in implementation roles, product development, marketing, brand management, and am now overseeing dinCloud. The company has been incubated out of an IT value-added reseller that was close to about $1 billion in revenue.

The founder of dinCloud had also founded that reseller, so he had been in the industry for a number of years as well. We initially started out as a desktop-as-a-service provider because there were a lot of opportunities around taking the physical desktop and the evolution of that into a virtual mode. We were already seeing this happen in the server space around 2010 and 2011. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 1)

The recruiting approach in large companies that hire large numbers in a given year is changing. Read on, to learn how cloud and video are becoming central to the current trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Montage.

Kurt Heikkinen: I’m the President and CEO of Montage. Personally, I have a few decades of experience in innovation inside of human capital management. Our company Montage is a leading provider of purpose-built video and voice interviewing technology that transforms the hiring process. We work with many large organizations to help them gain a hiring advantage using our solutions that are specifically tailored to support the complex requirements of recruiting and hiring. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 1)

If you are passionate about the future of data-leveraged decision making, this discussion will be great for you!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with setting a bit of context. We have talked about your entrepreneurial journey. Set some context about Coveo.

Louis Tetu: Coveo is a player in a space called intelligent search. More specifically, we provide technologies for enterprises that essentially aim at delivering the best available information to every employee and every customer, every time. What that means for practical purposes is, we help companies engage their customers with more relevant information, and we help companies leverage their data so that they can upscale their workforce empowering people with richer information so that they can do more on their own. That’s really the essence of what we do. We’re a little more than 200 people and growing very fast. We operate across the three continents. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 1)

We’ve discussed the vertical cloud trend in previous interviews. This discussion highlights the same trend, but from an entirely different point of view.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Sunera.

Ravi Reddy: Sunera Technologies is uniquely positioned in the way that we are helping organisations in digitalization of information technology and digitalization of business. A large number of our solutions and platforms are built on cloud for one to automate, predict IT applications and IT systems such that organisations can drive more productivity from their investments in IT and invest more in creating new business models that are evolving through digitalisation. That’s the core of Sunera.

Sramana Mitra: You need to walk us through some customer use cases. Tell us what kinds of customers you work with and walk us through how you add value to that process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pete Manca, CEO of Egenera (Part 1)

While Amazon dominates the public cloud platform market with AWS, and Microsoft is a distant second, emerging trends show that resellers and application developers are seeing alternatives. Read on for more…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Egenera.

Pete Manca: I’m the CEO at Egenera. Egenera is a 15-year-old software company and I have been with the company since the very beginning. We started off mainly in the infrastructure software space selling both the hardware and software solutions that were targeted towards the enterprise market. We did that for the first 10 years of the company’s existence.

About three years ago, we saw the trend of the cloud. We acquired a company in Ireland that specializes in cloud management. We transitioned the company from a traditional enterprise perpetual license software company to a cloud management company that is more of a subscription-based cloud-based company. Today, that’s our main focus—selling, what we call, wholesale cloud. We’re mainly selling for the reseller channel at a wholesale level and providing an easy way to introduce cloud to their customers.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? What specifically are you selling? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 1)

Jerry discusses high availability infrastructures in cloud computing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to the company.

Jerry Melnick: I’m the CEO and President of SIOS. I joined here about two and a half years ago. My background is in the areas of photonic computing and database systems. I came out of a Massachusetts-based startup known as Marathon Technologies. I came to SIOS because of the background that I saw here and the opportunity that was quite unusual and exceptional in terms of the fact that I could see that the product set here had an opportunity to meet a significant number of demands I had heard when I was in the space of photonic computing .

The real value proposition for the high availability offering that SIOS Technology provides is around the ability to be very flexible in terms of the types of high availability app configurations that can be constructed and the relevance in today’s infrastructure. Just to back up a little bit more about SIOS itself, SIOS was originally known as a SteelEye Technology focused on high availability clustering to deliver high level SLAs. The company cut its teeth in its first real enterprise high availability capability for Linux. The company provided solutions for database systems and later Windows and SQL server. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 1)

David was on the founding team of Siebel, back at the very beginning of the CRM industry. Now, with Vlocity, he is focusing on the next wave of industry-specific cloud solutions. Excellent discussion on the future of enterprise software.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to the company and also to yourself.

David Schmaier: I’m the CEO and founder of Vlocity. Vlocity is the leading provider of industry cloud applications on the Salesforce platform. We deliver industry-specific applications in the cloud for four industries: communications and media, insurance, health insurance, and public sector.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company? How long have you been around? What size are you at?

David Schmaier: It’s not venture-funded. It’s funded by myself and several people who founded a prior company called Veeva Systems. The three Veeva founders founded this company. We funded the company. Recently, we had some strategic partners who wanted to become investors. We >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost (Part 1)

The topic of this discussion is OpenSource Content Management and its evolution.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about yourself and DreamHost.

Simon Anderson: I’m the CEO of DreamHost. We are a cloud computing web hosting company that tries to be radically different in the industry and has done so for about 17 years since the company was started back in the late 90s. How we do that is, we’ve long been serving the long tail of web professionals and developers and aspiring individuals and entrepreneurs who are looking to leverage the web not only for themselves in terms of distributing content, but also ultimately for other people.

For many years going back to the early days of Linux, we’ve been big proponents of both using open source software ourselves and many other open source tools. In addition to that, we have been believers of open source, which started out as a software business model, but has evolved to be much bigger than that. It’s a way of engaging on big problems and bringing groups together to solve them in much more elegant and >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 1)

Read how a 34-year old company has carved a niche in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to Condusiv. What do you do? How do you map the ecosystem?

Brian Morin: We just turned 34 years old this month. We’re the 12^th oldest software company in the world. What’s interesting though is that for a company that has that kind of legacy, we were rebranded as Condusiv Technologies three years ago, because the company has really transformed itself and IP to really be on the leading edge of what’s going on right now. At least, in I/O performance. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 1)

There are sectors of industry that have made their entry into the world of technology very recently. Often, these sectors leapfrogged all the prior architectures and have come straight onto the cloud. Partly, this is because of the cost structure of prior architectures that they could not afford. The cloud is bringing many such industries into the age of modern technology at a furious pace. Chris Sullens talks about one such corner of an old-fashioned industry that is now modernizing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you and Marathon Data Systems. What do you do? What’s the business?

Chris Sullens: I’m President and CEO of Marathon Data Systems. We’re a leading provider of cloud-based mobile workforce solutions for the field service and transportation industry. In the field service side, we have an end-to-end business management platform that spans everything >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 1)

Cloud-based contact centers are an active space. Here’s an opportunity to get up to speed with the developments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s first introduce yourself to the audience as well as what you do in the company.

Mike Burkland: I’m the CEO of Five9. I joined here as CEO back in January, 2008 – over six years ago. Five9 was founded in 2001. We’re a leading pure cloud software provider to the call center market or, as we refer to it today, the contact center market. Five9 has over 2,000 businesses as clients. They run their contact centers on our cloud solution. They actually process, on an annual basis, about 3 billion customer interactions across the Five9 platform. When I joined, we were about $10 million in revenue. Now, >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 1)

We covered John Roberts’ Entrepreneur Journeys story in December of 2008. In this story, we explore the cloud CRM industry’s evolution with Larry Augustin, who replaced John as CEO on May 6, 2009.

Sramana Mitra: As you know, we have covered SugarCRM quite a bit before. So our audience does start off with some knowledge of the company. I’d like to start us out by asking you, now that we are in a mature phase of the cloud computing industry – and CRM on the cloud especially is in a very mature stage – what does your ecosystem look like? Who goes for what solution and why? Who chooses SugarCRM and why?

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5 Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing To Follow

A recent report released by Markets and Markets estimates the global cloud computing spend to grow to $121.1 billion by 2015, recording a compounded annual growth rate of 26% over the period 2010 through 2015. Another report by Market Research Media expects strong growth within cloud computing to continue. The report projects a 30% annual growth rate over the five year period from 2015 with the market expected to be worth $270 billion by 2020.

On my blog, I write an interview-based series called Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing where we invite industry folks with interesting vantage points to come and share their points of view about the industry and its trends, gaps, blue sky opportunities.
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