So it’s been for me here lately. Some eight years into the mission, I’ve embarked on a mission to take stock of exactly what we’ve built here at 360 Visibility, to address those elements that need attention, and to align everything inside an overarching brand that authentically represents who we want to be. The exercise has been invigorating.

Finding Inspiration

The inspiration for the overhaul took root at various events I’ve attended in recent months, where I was motivated by the likes of Lululemon CEO Chip Wilson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to scramble our corporate culture in a way that more accurately reflects our values. Add to that an external cascade of events—including market changes and the widespread commoditizing of the products we sell and deliver—and the call for change became too compelling to ignore. From sales to delivery to post to go live support, I’m freshly committed to having our entire company speak in a single voice that offers compelling evidence of our reason for being here.

All of this is no small undertaking, and I find myself returning to infancy with my efforts, learning to walk all over again. Certainly there’s no shortage of speeches, white papers and case studies detailing other executives’ efforts to revamp their corporate culture, but nowhere is there a handbook that lays out an exact path for doing so. It’s an endeavour that’s extremely individualized to the organization behind it.

Outside of the Comfort Zone

More than that, I am not in possession of a personality that’s naturally suited to the exercise. A designated accountant and certified management consultant by trade, I am an analyzer at heart. And changing a corporate culture is anything but analytical.

It is, however, extremely challenging, consistently gratifying and, dare I say, fun. My push to revitalize my business has emerged as my reason to come into work every day. I examine each of our entrenched processes and challenge it with a battery of questions: Why, why, why do we do it that way? One of our core values is to “keep it simple.” Applying that imperative in each case is the first move we make.

Reaching Out

So my new post is a soapbox from which I regularly preach the value of revolutionizing the way we look at things. Our weekly tactical meetings are now full of KPIs, and red, yellow, green and “supergreen” scorecards that focus us on our goals. We’re communicating with our customers via LinkedIn, newsletters, Youtube and other social media outlets.

360’s reinvention isn’t going to happen overnight. Indeed, I suspect it will take at least the rest of this fiscal year before we’ve made any meaningful strides on this front. But I truly believe we’ll all be better for the effort. And it’s an ongoing commitment. It’s one thing, after all, to identify the need for a refreshed corporate existence; it’s another to live it every single day.

Let us breathe, then, and draw in some of the new language this upheaval has brought into our revised realities.

Cloud Computing: Here, computer users share resources, business processes, applications and information as a utility service over a network. This shift takes an organization’s management of its own data from traditional software models to the Internet. Its existence traces back to large companies’ realization that their computing infrastructures weren’t exploiting their capacity consistently—in spite of a consistent cost.

Cloud Provider: An organization that makes a cloud-based infrastructure available to others to use and pay for.

Cloud Application: A software application that’s never installed on a local desktop computer, but is always available exclusively via the Internet.

Cloudware: The various bits of software that enable the provisioning, deployment, operation and management of applications in a cloud-computing environment.

Cloudburst: In its most negative sense, this term refers to a cloud-computing environment’s breakdown due to its inability to cope with a spike in demand, rendering the data it keeps inaccessible to their users. On a more positive note, the same word denotes the dynamic operation of whatever internally deployed software application works against just such a potential failure.

Vertical Cloud: A public cloud-computing infrastructure that’s designed to service the particular requirements of a single industry.

Hybrid Cloud: A combo of both private and public clouds, where users dip into one or the other, as needed.

External Cloud: A cloud-computing environment that’s outside the boundaries of a particular organization. It’s set up for use by select external parties, though not the general public.

Public Cloud: A cloud-computing infrastructure that’s open for use by anyone in the general public, including individuals and professional organizations.

Private Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that’s dedicated to the needs of a single organization for its exclusive usage.

Community Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that’s shared by multiple users (though not as many as share a public cloud) who possess common approaches to such issues as security, business continuity, privacy, availability and security.

Cloudstorming: Those instances in which multiple cloud environments are connected in a single, unified, virtual cloud. This is also referred to as a “cloud network.”

Cloud Portability The ability to easily move applications (and, often, their attendant parcels of data) across cloud-computing environments from discreet cloud providers, whether they be private or public clouds.

Cloud Enabler This term describes vendors who are not bona-fide cloud providers, but who facilitate users with the cloud-computing technology—along with its associated advantages—through such tools as cloudware.

Cloudwashing The arguably deceptive act of attaching the magical word “cloud” on existing products and services in order to capitalize on the spilloff effects of its power.

We’ve said it before and we will again. Cloud computing is a saviour of sorts—and for more than just your bottom line and overtaxed systems. No, cloud computing has a larger calling than that. One might even say that cloud computing is poised to deliver the world to a finer place, one in which waste and excess are recalled as sins of a more reckless age. With this communal data-storage marvel, the carbon emissions that would otherwise be sent heavenward from a churning-away corporate entity can be slashed meaningfully, and the world thus scores a significant reduction to its reliance on carbon. 

This news comes by way of the Carbon Disclosure Project, an AT&T-funded European study whose just-released results suggest that large companies in the UK and France who migrate their data to shared data networks in the cloud could cut their emissions by a full 50% by 2020.

The savings, quite simply, are a result of the decreased call for energy consumption of the new over the old. The cloud’s responsive flexibility means customers only use what they need, sidestepping the wastefulness and redundancy of yesteryear.

Money Savings, Carbon Savings

The study, which focused its attention on large IT companies in Great Britain and France, found that big UK organizations that move to cloud computing could enjoy carbon reductions that are equivalent to the annual emissions of over four million passenger vehicles. Oh, and they’ll also save in energy costs, to the tune of about £1.2 billion—findings that underscore a recent announcement by a British cabinet minister that the UK government’s cloud strategy could save British taxpayers as much as £460 million a year—so it’s not all selfless stuff on offer here.

The figures were understandably somewhat lower in France, where nuclear power reigns supreme in the business of electricity delivery, but blue-chip French companies are also poised to exploit some pretty noteworthy savings, too. And, say the study’s authors, the exploitation will be on a grand scale, as almost 70% of these organizations’ IT resources will reside in the cloud by 2020. That’s up markedly from the 10% at which the services are currently used.

Closer to Home

Closer to home, the report concludes that a large North American company that made the switch to the cloud now could be sitting on top of $12.3 billion in yearly savings, and annual carbon reductions that are equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil, by 2020.

Considering that neither of these diminutions—energy or cost—serve as the most persuasive reason to switch over to the cloud (that distinction remains a function of speed, and the accelerated pace at which all corporate activities can take place in the cloud), the argument is more compelling still. Where developers used to take 45 days to get new servers, one pundit remarked, the much more responsive-to-demand internal cloud has shrunk that lag to just a couple of minutes.

Send your stuff up into the cloud, it seems, and you just might save the world.

In fact, the looming cloud heralding the next stage of corporate computing, the same one that’s sent nervous naysayers into all manner of anxious fits, has a broad silver lining that these fretful types probably haven’t considered.

The Silver Lining

In a blessedly optimistic editorial published in late October, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman makes the point that the oppressive economic climate currently shrouding the United States is actually conducive to bursts of creativity like no other time in recent memory. And this advancement will unfold, in large part, courtesy of the supremely affordable and eminently functional resource that is cloud computing.

The latest phase in the IT revolution, he says, is being driven by the convergence of social media with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones—all of it operating under the facilitating miracle that is the cloud. The thousands of software applications stored in this cyber cell transform our handhelds into extraordinarily powerful devices that confer on their users the potential for unprecedented innovation. The cloud has lowered the barriers to entry like nothing else.

Startups to the Rescue

Specifically, goes the argument, this technology shift will clear the way for new companies of all stripes, from insurance brokerages to medical labs, to dip into a nominally priced technological asset and borrow its overarching infrastructure to create from within. With this exceedingly useful tool, entrepreneurs can find their feet more cheaply and easily than they could even five years ago. Where previous eras required serious commitments of capital toward promotion, real estate, labour and technology to establish an operation, the cloud has removed a substantial chunk from the imperatives. The savings to be realized from employing a cloud solution rather than the traditional means and their attendant call for application servers, database servers, various on-premise applications and a slew of expensive IT personnel are genuinely meaningful for a startup. The cloud’s arrival in our midst has delivered supercomputing powers to the masses and, said Friedman in an earlier column, produced a “DIY economy.”

S.O.C.I.A.L

As Friedman describes in this editorial, Marc Benioff, the founder of cloud-based software provider Salesforce.com, this phase of the IT revolution might be summed up with the acronym SOCIAL: S for “speed,” O for “open,” C for “collaboration, I for “individuals,” A for “alignment” and L for “leadership.”

“The emergence of the cloud,” goes the piece, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour. This is speeding up everything—innovation, product cycles and competition.”

High-Performing Microsoft Gold Certified Partner wins Microsoft Partner of the Year – Ingram Micro (VTN) VentureTech Network Award; CEO recognized on Profit’s list of 100 top female entrepreneurs.

Toronto, 20 October 2011 — It’s been a banner week for 360 Visibility and its CEO, Lynn Cooke. First, Cooke was recognized with a berth on Profit magazine’s W100 list, which celebrates successful Canadian female entrepreneurs. Next, the company Cooke co-founded with Marco D’Ercole was selected by Microsoft for its esteemed Ingram Micro (VTN) – Microsoft Partner of the Year Award.

Cooke was ranked in the 76th position on the Profit W100 rankings, up from the #98 spot she occupied in 2010. The PROFIT W100 ranks applicants by a composite score that considers the size, growth rate and profitability of the companies they own and manage.

The women on the inventory come from all corners of Canada and their businesses – which range in size from five to 1,300 employees – span a vast range of industries. In 2010, W100 firms generated almost $1.4 billion in revenue, and provided the equivalent of 9,000 full-time jobs. Taken together, the entrepreneurs on the list grew their businesses by an average of 156% over the past three years.

“Given that this award covers a recessionary period,” says Cooke, “I must say that I feel pleased with our accomplishment.”

Microsoft Partner of the Year, presented October 17 in Las Vegas, the VTN Spotlight awards recognize many of the year’s best-performing VTN members and organizations. The VentureTech Network is a select North American organization of independent professional IT firms within Ingram Micro Canada who focus on small to mid-size businesses.

“This is a major win for us,” says Cooke. “What an honour to be singled out within such an elite group of technology companies.”

About 360 Visibility Inc.

360 Visibility is a business solutions company dedicated to enabling enterprise clients to make swift, well-informed, coordinated and profitable business decisions. Our expertise includes Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Licensing, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365, , VoIP Communications Systems and technology infrastructure. The Toronto-based firm concentrates its practice in the professional services, distribution, and property management industries. To learn more visit us at www.360visibility.com

About the Profit W100

Now in its 13th year, the Profit W100 ranking and awards program is Canada’s largest celebration of female entrepreneurs. It honours their achievements, highlight the immense benefits they create for their workforces and communities, and identifies their most effective business practices. The ranking and accompanying coverage of these entrepreneurs and their secrets for success appear annually in the November issue of Profit magazine and at www.profitguide.com.

About the Ingram Micro VentureTech Network

The Ingram Micro VentureTech Network helps premier SMB solution providers grow their businesses through relationships with key vendor and reseller contacts, exclusive offers and SMB-focused programs and services that aren’t found anywhere else in the industry.

With more and more organizations opting to store their data on cloud computing systems rather than under their own roofs, outsourcing data centres are springing up like mushrooms to answer the demand. That development, say the folks at this Colorado-based thinktank, spins off into all kinds of good stuff, including savings in manpower, savings in money and—here’s where the world’s interests kick in—savings in energy. Indeed, say the analysts behind the research, this cloud business could help reduce the world’s energy costs by almost a third over the next decade.

First up, the stuff that lines the pockets.

Revenue from these proliferating data centres, predicts the new research, will inflate to a compound annual growth rate over the next decade of 29%. In hard numbers, that means a revenue climb from $46 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion in 2015. More than that, says the report—titled “Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency”—new investments in the stuff will continue to spur greater efficiency for those dollars spent.

Indeed, Pike Research’s analysis suggests that, absent the cloud, only the very largest commercial or governmental organizations would have the capital and expertise required to achieve the same kind of efficiency at a comparable cost.

Green Shoots

But it’s the trending transformation of another kind of green, says Pike’s senior analyst Eric Woods, that’s even more impressive.

“Cloud computing revenue will grow strongly over the next decade,” Woods says. “But the reduction in energy consumption will be even more significant.”

Pike forecasts that, if the world continues along its current cloud-computing adoption curve, overall data centre energy consumption will be slashed by a dramatic 31% in the period between 2010 and 2020.

This news comes on the heels of other publicly stated initiatives that acknowledge the wasteful footprint of the globe’s infinite IT goings on. Facebook, for one, recently announced that it intends to make public the details of its data centres such that others might benefit from this massive operation’s evolving understanding of energy efficiency. According to the social media giant, the servers in its refurbished data house—which apparently took two years and tens of millions of dollars to complete—run 38% more efficiently, and 24% less expensively, than those in their comparable peers.

One Centre, Less Energy

Simply put, goes the report, clouds are better utilized and less expensive to operate than traditional, siloed data repositories are. The more disparate operations they take in under their generous eaves, the more efficiently is this channel of energy expended.

And all signs point to a continued drift in this direction. As increasingly more of the work that was conventionally performed in internal data centres is consigned to the cloud, the world’s basket of energy consumption, associated energy expenses and greenhouse gas emissions suffers ever fewer hands dipping into its bounty.

Consider, too, the very prickly subject of cloud security, heretofore much maligned for its apparently inherently contained contradiction but, in a recent show of enlightenment, perhaps rewritten as saviour rather than villain.

Big Picture Author

In this Wall Street Journal article, a big-picture pundit introduces the extraordinary idea that the cloud may in fact be the safest place to store our data, the deafening cries that have long argued the opposite notwithstanding.

The article’s author, John Bussey, submits that data consigned to the cloud actually enjoys an abundance of sophisticated security-enhancing features that an organization, particularly one in the small-to-mid-sized category, simply couldn’t access on its own.

“The sheer size of cloud businesses like Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services,” the piece goes, “allows significantly more investment in security policing and countermeasures than almost any company, large or small, could afford themselves.”

Go Big to Stay Secure

More than that, Bussey points out, the average computer user is not as attentive to even the most routine security imperatives as he needs to be. But sign on with just a “plain-vanilla” cloud package provider and you automatically score security basics such as updated antivirus runs and as-needed software patch applications. Any upgrade from there improves your lot further with enhanced security features like data firewalls, high-end encryption and 24-hour tech support.

“Small and medium businesses are insane not to leverage the advantages of cloud computing,” Jim Reavis, of the industry group Cloud Security Alliance, told Bussey. “It ends up being almost in all cases a security upgrade, because they can’t otherwise afford the practices.”

A Lone Voice in the Wilderness

Of course, this voice in the wilderness is still powerfully eclipsed by the hue and cry of the status quo. And it’s a position endlessly reinforced by the studies that continue to pour in with findings that tell stories of organizations’ enduring wariness of the idea of entrusting their data with an off-site third party. And this is the scene even in spite of an ongoing flurry of initiatives undertaken by IT security vendors, cloud providers and industry evangelists themselves to redress this issue.

Still Talking to Ghosts

Just this week, a study unveiled at the V3 Virtual Cloud Summit in Great Britain reported that a full 87% of enterprises remain concerned about security in the cloud.

And some 72% of small (fewer than 100 employees), and 63% of mid-sized (100 to 999 employees) companies told technology research firm IDC, in 2008, that security was their most pressing concern when it came to the notion of transferring their operations to the cloud. That those numbers had contracted to 50% and 47%, respectively, when the same survey was conducted three years later, is a thundering step in the right direction.

Because revolution, after all, is a slow business. Remember how long it took to come around to that broccoli?