I posted a little while back about the ‘tech tutorials’ I was conducting for a couple of friends interested in learning more about the industry. One of my pupils attended the Cloud Summit Executive last Tuesday and wrote an article about her experience for Thalas.

I’ve re-posted in here for your enjoyment. Yay Char!

The Cloud & Thalas

This week, Techweb launched The Cloud Summit in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. This seminal event brought together those in the industry ready to take businesses of all sizes to the next level of performance. Thalas was there to see if tech is keeping up with our vision of a viable future. We were not disappointed.

What is THE CLOUD? Long gone are the days when a definition must precede a movement. The Cloud is a perfect example of how innovation cannot wait. The tools, the definitions, the users and the clients served come together like a bolt of lightening, illuminating possibilities. The cloud is currently without a simple definition, though its power is obvious. It is a concept so powerful Dell wanted to trademark it and Microsoft and Google are racing for dominance within it.

The Cloud is going to change the way you do business. It is going to make sense all of those group projects you did in school. All that talk of collaboration will apply in the real world in a way that it never has before. The community is coming back together. No more isolation. All for one and one for all, we can create together! The in-house server is gone. The software updates simply appear. You and you colleagues are left alone to do what you do best as a cohesive group. The stuff you don’t do well is now handled by someone else, in a space from which you can retrieve it when you need it.

What is your business like today? Your product is great. You and your team believe in it and you want to get out to the consumer. Your company allocates a significant part of the budget to a tech department to set up your software and keep it current. Then you have your sales force and you have to maintain your records. Your little company with a great product becomes a company spending half of it’s energy running an HR department, keeping files organized and your central hub is feeling smaller everyday. What about your product? After a while, you can’t remember why you wanted to have a business in the first place.

What does life in the Cloud look like? It is a magical place where all of your documents are stored for later use. You are in San Francisco and your VP is in Hong Kong. You are editing the same document in Google Docs at the same time while you talk on Skye. You’re on Google Chrome, and tab over to check out your sales data on Saleforce.com. You are at a café while this is happening. You don’t have a central hub. You have thousands of users but your company doesn’t have a server. You don’t need it. Your whole company lives in the Cloud. All of this is happening over your phone. Which is fortunate for your newest hire, which is in Latin America and has never owned a PC. She doesn’t need to and isn’t missing a thing.

What does the Cloud mean to Thalas? It means we can do what we have been doing, only faster and easier. We have been working as independent thinkers with specific skills and talents that make a solid, balanced team. But it took time and energy to get those files transferred. It took all of us extending beyond what we love to do into areas we are not as strong. Sure, it is good to test one’s abilities and do what has to be done for the sake of the company. We are all willing to do that. But how wonderful will be it be when specialization and collaboration finally gels? When it reaches that level where we are doing what we love and are good at all the time? This is the foundation of Thalas. To be able to do what you love to do with other people who are doing what they love to do. A place where you might work long hours but those hours are fun and exciting. A space where you are living out your purpose and appreciated for your unique abilities.

Thalas wasn’t waiting for the Cloud to revolutionize business. Thalas is on the cutting edge of changing the business model through helping people tap into the sweet spot.  It is that spot where what you love to do meets the things you are good at, combined with what people are willing to pay you to do. Thalas has been helping people find that spot and live in it. The Cloud will help all of those people work together in ways they never have before.