During the morning session at today’s Business Cloud Summit in London, a panel made up of representatives from three businesses spoke about how they’ve taken to the Cloud to run a variety of business critical processes.

Ciara Hassan, HR Director, Lancaster Landmark Hotel Group, spoke highly of her experience of implementing a Cloud solution: "We’ve bought software from SuccessFactors to help with our performance management. For instance, we weren’t doing a good job at sharing our people around our hotels."

"We know now how the business is performing from a team and business perspective. We know where we need to focus our training on. From my point of view, we wanted a business solution that was easy to implement."

Hassan revealed SuccessFactors’ position as a Cloud vendor wasn’t a factor Lancaster Landmark Hotel Group’s decision to choose the company: "The simplicity of it was most important. It forced us to look at communication, because when you go from non-IT to IT the way you communicate becomes different. It’s been hugely significant for us."

Like Hassan, Patrick Murray, CFO, Opta Sports Data, spoke about how Opta didn’t go out in search of a Cloud-specific solution: "We had an issue of where our sales team wasn’t talking to our operations team as we grew, and we needed a CRM system to fill that gap. After a looking at what was available, we found Netsuite was best for our requirement. We’ve seen it as transformational in our business."

 

"We didn’t go out looking for a cloud system; we went out to look for a CRM system. We had to take the IT team we had at that point from on-premise software and go through the path of saying ‘Ok this is a Cloud system, we don’t object to it’."

 

He added: "It would be difficult to do what we did with an on-premise system."

 

The power of the Cloud for business critical applications was also revealed by Mark Charmer, co-founder at water and sanitation development enabler, Akvo. "Working in lots of different locations around the world is really hard. However, getting people used to using the system was easy because there is some neat stuff like Google doc, which enables us to develop strategy documents and training material."

A key benefit of using Cloud-based applications for Akvo is streamlined collaboration. "[Before] we’d have guys working in San Francisco and The Hague on the same document, and collaboration was difficult. Today, we’re publishing a lot of material online which can be changed over time. I’m never scared when I’m publishing any material on our site, except when we do an email shot!"

Akvo’s clients are non-government agencies and getting some to use Cloud applications was described as ‘difficult’ by Charmer: "Culturally, some of them find it difficult; a lot of them are stuck in a case study culture. But for every organisation that struggles with it, there are others that adopt it."

He added: "Sometimes you have to find a new gen of customers coming through."

One of the issues still facing Akvo is charting project progress with field partners operating in rural areas of the developing world. Charmer explained: "There are a lot of issues with how do you do project updates from a local field office. We have 150 partners, and a lot of them are field partners working in places like Gujarat, with one PC wheezing away without net access. Field teams often use USB sticks back to the main town put the data on that."

"We’ve prioritised web interface and an SMS interface. For teams without net access, they’re getting excited about the potential for updating project progress via SMS."

Going forward, Opta’s Murray revealed the desire to implement further functionality from Netsuite’s product range, though he admitted: "I’m not sure we’ll be able to put our data collection system onto a Cloud platform. That will be potentially quite tough because you’re doing things that happen seconds after the game."

Having implemented a Cloud-based performance management system, Ciara Hassan is planning to delve further: "[So far] we’ve only implemented performance management, but we’ll deploy the talented management side as well hopefully soon. Equally, I’m looking into HR software to make us more IT savvy as well."