Building a music school in the cloud

By , 15 October 2012 at 18:10
Building a music school in the cloud
Business

Building a music school in the cloud

By , 15 October 2012 at 18:10

Alex SalkeverBy Alex Salkever, Global Product Manager, Cloud Computing, Telefonica Digital 

A few weeks ago, I read an excellent article (by @mattrosoff) about how the School of Rock built out its IT offering in the cloud.

It’s typical of how fast-growing young companies are building businesses with no on-premise software. And it’s an awesome testament to the power of the cloud to allow a startup to quickly scale and grow.

Backstory – School of Rock is a franchise business that teaches kids rock-n-roll music with real instruments. (It’s also a hilarious movie starring Jack Black – unrelated). The company is growing very fast in the U.S., with nearly three-dozen outlets rolling out in the coming year. And as School of Rock grew, the company needed to give its franchisees a comprehensive IT structure (CRM, document sharing and control, etc). Many franchisees were Mac users, meaning traditional enterprise software tools were a bit harder to support. Further, the company did not want to spend much money on maintaining its own internal IT systems.

So company VP of Digital Strategy Evan Trent stapled together a variety of services (including Box for file sharing and versioning, Okta for single-sign on, Salesforce Do.com, and Docusign for document signing). They even went so far as to start offering Google Chrome books as client devices. The result? Very little upfront cost. Lots of functionality. Lots of flexibility. (Shameless plug: We share this viewpoint and are making it easy for startups to rock out in the cloud with rapid IT buildouts via our Aplicateca online marketplaces. We also partner with Microsoft to offer their Office365 Cloud suite, which is quite solid).

As someone based in San Francisco who spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley, it’s clear to me this is the New Normal for startups and its climbing the value chain as cloud services penetrate more deeply into the enterprise.

The upshot? The future of enterprise IT, from the bottom to the top, is more and more cloudy – and that’s great for companies that want to scale fast and compete on a level playing field with even the biggest enterprises.

 

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