Potluck in the Cloud

Yesterday my colleagues and I had a potluck dinner for our holiday party. It was excellent: char-grilled tri-tip and chicken, al pastor tacos, yams, potato and rice casseroles, asparagus, salad, cheesecake, cookies, cheese and crackers, chips and salsa and dip, hot dogs, cocktails, and wine.

The obvious advantages of potlucks are that they give everyone a chance to participate in meal preparation; bring what they want to contribute; try new dishes or new recipes of familiar dishes; and enjoy more dishes than would normally be the case if it were catered or if the group ordered individually at a restaurant. There’s a spirit of collaboration and satisfaction in a successful group effort resulting in the pleasure of a great meal.

There are similar advantages to cloud-based computing systems. Since they’re usually easy to prepare, scale, and serve to users, you don’t need a master chef and numerous other chefs to architect, provision, and configure them. You and your department can collaborate on ideas among the many niche cloud applications that you want to bring to the table. Cloud-based solutions are also less expensive and leaner than on-premises systems.

One issue you may have with cloud-based solutions is that they are new to you, just like dishes you never tried. If that is the case, try these delicacies; we put them through a rigorous vetting process to ensure that they have the right recipe for success:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Happy holidays! May your culinary experiences during this festive time all attain the satisfaction I had at the holiday potluck, and may your cloud-based systems bring good cheer in the coming year!