On a cloudless, beautiful late October evening, our invited guests and the Summa team assembled to Explore the Cloud through the lens of our three great speakers. The Heinz History Center served as an appropriate venue with Pittsburgh’s rich history on display. Appropriately, we learned a little known, historic factoid from one of our guest speakers, David Linthicum. He shared the origins of the term “Cloud Computing”, having been invented over thirty years ago by Western Union but only recently popularized after multiple attempts to enlist a sustainable description for the distributed computing model. Dave shared his insights on the cloud market, depicting it as an evolution to a more optimized, cost effective and elastic approach for enterprise computing while acknowledging that the market is still maturing.

Richard Ho of Salesforce.com, profiled several companies and their successful employment of the Force.com platform to accelerate new application development in weeks verses months.  Of particular interest, was Richard’s illustration of the extraordinary operational scale that Salesforce.com has achieved with its multi-tenant application architecture

Lori Ashby, of Highmark, then provided the audience with a compelling view on the value Highmark has realized from their implementation of multiple cloud applications. Lori described the business value realized from two separate sales process applications launched on Salesforce.com and a third custom application, created on the Force.com platform, which has satisfied another critical, process automation requirement. In each of these cases, the cloud solutions not only delivered increased time-to-value, iterative cycle development and lower cost deployment for the business, but also produced the desired results for the individual, sales producers. These important market channel representatives now possess the capabilities to drive long-term client retention through shared customer intelligence and a holistic view of the customer relationship.

I concluded the evening program previewing Summa’s new cloud readiness application assessment offering. This offering focuses on helping clients evaluate their cloud business case and assess their technology architecture readiness for cloud development and integration.  Afterwards, Summa hosted a client reception, where many of the attendees stayed to exchange views with Dave, Richard, Lori and the extended Summa team. All together, the attendees and speakers enjoyed a fun and insightful evening in the clouds!

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