Remember ASPs anyone?

Having worked in the world of cloud before it was called cloud (remember ASPs anyone?) I am still excited to see the continual developments that cloud computing enables. 

Platforms such as Microsoft Azure and AWS provide so many additional services built on their core cloud technology.  Here we think nothing of spinning up a virtual desktop on AWS to run testing or  building Chatbots that use multiple cloud services to deliver a great end user experience. 

And this week’s CloudExpo Europe at Excel in London is a very real example of where the cloud market has gone.  Under the CloudExpo banner are colocated shows including Cloud and Cyber Security Expo, Smart IOT, Big Data and AI World.  All demonstrating how cloud has enabled all businesses access to technology that if it had existed 15 years ago would have required large dedicated in-house infrastructure and crucially expensive and hard to come by technical expertise to set it all up. 

When I was involved in early desktop virtualisation projects companies had 10-20 or so applications to virtualise.

We host no services internally and use over 75 cloud based services to deliver services to our customers. 

We use Google, Microsoft and Amazon AWS and services for core applications and then what seems a never ending list of applications like Coda.io and Slack. 

Running a business like ours would not have been possible 10 years ago.  Our infrastructure costs would have crippled up. 

Not that the cloud isn’t without its own issues and businesses are acutely aware of the death by a thousand cuts that the small monthly bills inflict when they are totalled up.  When you move out of the free tier of these services the $30 a user a month bills rack up quickly. 

We have created a stack for marketing automation for small business which we use for our customers.  It does 95% of what something like Hubspot delivers but for a fraction of the price and integrates with more third party platforms.  This is something we couldn’t have achieved even 5 years ago. 

So as I walk round CloudExpo Europe this week I will be looking for more ways to bring this technology to our customers.  

And I’ll be popping into the Blockchain Expo, too early for most of our customers but the future is now and we help our customers access the future.