Where Our Cloud Story Begins
In a recent post by Brian Solis, he interviewed NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, and Nelson’s opinions of cloud-based software mirrors our own so we took the time to reflect on some of Nelson’s major points and compare our Cloud journey with other businesses.
Almost two years ago we started watching the trend of business solution providers move their services to the Cloud and started doing our homework on cloud software. As Nelson puts it, “cloud computing is the last computing architecture,” and while there may be new applications delivered on the cloud, cloud computing and distributing resources in this form is the end of the line for software development.
Most IT companies deploy new technology from a top-down standpoint; we write the software and train you on using it. When we started brainstorming our PMS system being in the cloud, we wanted to provide our clients with software that was written by them for them. A question raised in Solis’ post is, what are we trying to solve?
We know our clients aren’t programmers, so we jumped at the opportunity to take years’ worth of feedback and create an application based on the everyday needs of a property manager. We were trying to solve for a PMS solution that would make our clients’ businesses run better, provide them the right tools to do so, and using technology that’s sustainable.
Even back in 2012, IBM predicted that 63 percent of companies would increase their cloud investments over the next two years and that 85 percent of new software built in 2013 would be built for cloud delivery! Here we are two years later and we’re pretty excited about the progress of our Cloud PMS.
Currently, we’re using an advisory board to help us through our Alpha testing stage. These 20+ members are testing the software thoroughly to make sure it has the features and tools needed to manage a property as well as alert our programmers to any minor bugs or glitches. We’re now moving our advisory board into Beta testing and appreciate the feedback from the members. Again, our goal, much like Nelson said should be the goal of cloud-based applications, is to create software solely with the end users in mind.
As Solis writes, “running a business should not happen because of technology. In his view, technology should just work so that you can prioritize attention on the things that matter to your business today and tomorrow.”