Back in the Spring I decided to escape from the office for a day and take in the inaugural CRN Partner Connect exhibition at The Ricoh Arena, Coventry.

Now, strictly speaking, if asked to justify my attendance at the event I might have struggled. From the literature that landed in my inbox it seemed much more geared towards network sellers & resellers rather than the software end of the IT market which we at Athium inhabit. What caught my eye though was the list of keynote speakers on the first of the two days.

CompTIA chief executive Todd Thibodeaux. Barry Ridgway, general manager of small medium solutions and partner group at Microsoft. Kevin Matthews, UK and Ireland channel manager ESS at Hewlett Packard. Simon Baker, software group cloud leader at IBM. Peter Lorant, head of EMEA channels at Google.

The theme of the speakers’ seminars was the potential of cloud computing.

Given that we design software solutions that seek to harness that potential, and that it is rare for such a collection of speakers to be literally on our doorstep, I was sold. To be honest, I didn’t expect too much from the content of the seminars to be directly relevant to what we do, but it would be a good chance to do a bit of local networking and to get up to speed on what is creating waves in the other half of our industry. At the very least, I’d come away with a pocket full of pens and flash drives from the 50+ exhibitors’ stands.

I was wrong.

One of the seminars, the second of the day from Todd Thibodeaux from CompTIA, was one of those genuinely rare moments that can fundamentally change your approach to what you do at work. It wasn’t the first 5 minutes of Todd producing from his briefcase every conceivable portable electronic device, from iPads to mobile phone to netbooks to 3G dongles, and then making the point that for all of the power of these ‘toys’ there was little in the way of joined up thinking between them, or indeed a universal power cable for them.

It also wasn’t the bulk of the talk about how the cloud revolution had dawned in a blaze of hype, had faded away and was now truly gaining traction across all developed and developing markets.

What hit home for me was a throw away 2 minute section about helping your client get their head around the cloud before taking a leap into it without a parachute.

As a company we pride ourselves in our approach to our clients. We take the time to understand what all of the requirements are for the software we have been approached to develop. We also help our clients to understand their server options. What got me thinking though was that for all the effort we go to in explaining just what needs considering before opting for a cloud solution, I wonder just how much of that actually sinks in.

Todd summed it up by saying, (hopefully he’ll forgive my recollection if I’ve paraphrased here);

‘Your potential clients will have a vague idea about what cloud computing is, if only because if they are talking to you then they are looking for the type of solution you provide.’

‘You’ll then explain to them exactly what the cloud is all about, why it is the future and why there won’t be anyone considering any other approach in 3 years time. If they are not convinced then you’ll tell them that they are already using cloud solutions on a daily basis. Googlemail. Hotmail. Facebook. Amazon.’

‘Remember though. The decision to move into the cloud should be about much more than being on the leading edge. Much more than getting a more powerful, more dynamic solution for less than a traditionally served solution. There are questions that your potential client needs to ask themselves. The answers to them won’t rule out heading into the cloud, but they might change the flight plan.’

The questions posed by Todd, citing Robert McHale, author of Data Security and Identity Theft: New Privacy Regulations That Affect Your Business, were variants on the following;

• How is a cloud based solution better for me on a day to day basis?
• Where is my data being stored? Literally, in which Country or Territory?
• What are the data protection laws like in that Country?
• What about privacy laws? Who can legally have the right to examine that data, and how long is that data kept on archive for?
• Are back-ups being made? Where are they stored? If that’s in another Country, how does that change the data protection considerations?
• My connection from my browser to the data is secure, but is the route my data takes around the cloud?
• If I want to move to another cloud, how easy is that to do?
• If I move, how do I know all my data is removed from the old cloud? What about the back-ups?

Even when all of those have been answered, there are more considerations;

• Is a public cloud appropriate for my data?
• How private is the private cloud I have been offered?
• Is a hybrid solution best? Wait, what is a hybrid solution?

I sat from then on only half listening as I processed all of our recent projects mentally, applying those questions to the solutions we had delivered. The conclusion I came to was that we had indeed addressed them all, and provided the best possible solution to fit the answers, even where that meant staying outside the cloud. We’d delivered the best outcome for our clients, but did they realise it? For those solutions we’d delivered in the cloud, did the clients realise that they hadn’t just got a cloud based piece of software, but the right cloud to float it in?

I resolved to make sure that I plagiarised Todd in every specification meeting I attended from that point onwards, and to make sure I did the same with our existing clients the next time they were due for a service review.

At that point my phone rumbled in my pocket with an incoming email (Googlemail!) and snapped me back into the room. Todd had been replaced on stage by the Microsoft speakers who were in mid-flow about their journey into the cloud with their latest Office offering. Todd had over-run apparently and as he was ushered off stage, Microsoft were ushered on in a bid to keep the timetable on track.

I quietly left the back of the room and headed out into the exhibition hall. I wanted to catch up with Mr Thibodeaux to pick his brains further on how to communicate cloud considerations. He was though nowhere to be found near the CompTIA stand. Disappointed I headed back towards the seminar room, stopping to pocket a pen here and a stress ball there from the stands enroute.

When I retook my seat, Microsoft had given way to Google. Still, there’s always next year…..