Olympics in the Cloud

U.S. Bobsled Team and Night Train

I spent the last two weeks watching the Winter Olympics every night. Probably like most people, I was impressed with the athletes’ skill and dedication, and the international character of the Olympics. Here are links to the Vancouver 2010 website and to NBC for results, videos, and athlete profiles.

Holcomb, Olsen, Mesler, Tomasevicz

You probably saw, read, and heard a lot about most of the medalists, but what about the three men behind driver Steven Holcomb on the U.S. gold medal bobsled team? I never saw them named or addressed when they stood behind Holcomb in the televised interviews. So, without further ado, I offer special congratulations to the other three men on the U.S. bobsled team: Justin Olsen, Steve Mesler, and Curt Tomasevicz. Congratulations to Steven, Justin, Steve, and Curt for winning the first four-man bobsled gold medal for the United States since 1948!

Geoff Bodine

The winning bobsled, Night Train, leads us to two more illustrious sports careers: NASCAR Driver Geoff Bodine and NFL football hall-of-famer Dick “Night Train” Lane. Bodine won the Daytona 500 in 1986 and he was honored as one of “NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers” during NASCAR’s 50th anniversary celebration. In 1992 Bodine founded the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project with chassis and suspension design specialist Bob Cuneo, because he correctly believed they could build a better bobsled than the imports that American teams were using. Bodine and Cuneo had already collaborated for years on Bodine’s NASCAR vehicles. Here’s an excellent case study about the sled design. Bodine was extremely lucky to survive this truck racing crash on February 18, 2000 and then see his bobsled win at the Olympics 10 years later on February 27, 2010.

Dick "Night Train" Lane

I don’t know if Night Train the bobsled is named after Dick “Night Train” Lane, but he was the greatest defensive back in NFL history, according to this video. He still holds the record he set in 1952 for most interceptions in one season, although the way he tackled around the neck is dangerous and is now not allowed. I sort of crossed paths with both Night Trains; Dick “Night Train” Lane ultimately played for the Detroit Lions in my home state Michigan, and I was nicknamed “Night Train” after him. Night Train the bobsled was built in Connecticut, where I lived for two years.

You host a business and IT olympics every time you consider a new IT strategy, contract, or purchase. You need to collect and vet ideas to define an appropriate strategy, and then find and vet the best products, team, and vendors that can carry you to victory.

Consider these Cloud Olympic champions that will help you drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need 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 Attensity360 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.

What types of business and IT projects are you planning for success in your organization, and are you planning to use cloud-based solutions to speed you to your best performance?