Cloud Computing Drives Mobile and Vice Versa

April 5th, 2012 by Healy Jones

The press is starting to understand something that we’ve known here for a while at OfficeDrop – Mobile and Cloud Computing go hand in hand. Check out this chart on top reasons for an enterprise to adopt a cloud strategy:

why adopt cloud computing

Why Adopt Cloud Computing

Mobile is the top reason enterprises are moving applications to cloud computing platforms.

We’ve seen this here at OfficeDrop, with the success of our mobile applications and the huge engagement we get with our cloud connected mobile apps like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app and our Android scanner app. If you don’t have them yet, you should download them now – they are free and come with your OfficeDrop online cloud account – with both the paid or free accounts!

The article says, “With the increasing number and diversity of mobile computing devices, which have much less on-board storage than traditional end-user computing environments, there is a shift toward moving much of the functionality of an app into a centralized environment, like a cloud. This allows storage, computation, data access, security and management to all be handled in a centralized fashion.”

In other words, the cloud and mobile computing go hand in hand, where the mobile device can simply access the large amounts of data stored in the cloud at anytime, from anywhere.

Accessing the Cloud from Mobile Devices Growing

Another great piece of information in the article comes from ABI research, who suggest that “240 million business customers will access cloud-computing services via mobile devices by 2015 and that number could approach a billion.”

The article goes on to talk about the difference between native mobile apps and cloud connected apps – “But applications that run on mobile devices are often limited in functionality and are generally not business-class applications; it’s very rare to find native smartphone apps used as serious front ends for database queries, for instance.

In contrast, mobile cloud computing applications run on servers that reside in the cloud. Application data also lives in the cloud and results are fed back to the mobile device via an over-the-air network such as 3G or 4G. Users access apps and data via the browser on their mobile devices.”

You should visit the Computerworld to read the entire piece here.

Posted in android, Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, iPad, iphone, Market Research, mobile, OfficeDrop | 1 Comment »

Cloud Computing Creating Jobs

April 3rd, 2012 by Healy Jones

If you are not in the internet startup community, you may not realize the amount of hiring and job growth that is happening in the cloud computing space. In fact, OfficeDrop has just added three new people and we are potentially bringing on a consultant to help us with a development project over the next couple of months too!

All this growth in cloud computing is driving creating a lot of jobs. That’s why it’s interesting to check out a recent Forbes piece entitled “Cloud Computing Will Generate 14 Million Jobs.” The article states, “Cloud computing will potentially generate at least 14 million new jobs across the globe within the next three years. Moreover, these new jobs may likely be in many areas outside of IT.”

Well, we are doing our part here at OfficeDrop! You can check out our Boston Cloud Computing Careers page here.

Posted in cloud computing | No Comments »

Fun Wall Street Journal Article with OfficeDrop

April 3rd, 2012 by Healy Jones

OfficeDrop iPad lover & cloud computing expert (and CEO) Prasad Thammineni was highly featured in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in an article on the Steve Jobs Biography. The article starts with, “Prasad Thammineni, the chief executive of a file-sharing start-up called OfficeDrop in Cambridge, Mass., was no fan of Steve Jobs after Apple took a long time adding one of the company’s apps to its iTunes Store. But as he read the hefty biography “Steve Jobs,” the 42-year-old Mr. Thammineni found himself buying into many of the Apple co-founder’s management ideas.”

officedrop in wall street journal

Appearing on the first page of the Management section of the WSJ, the article is a lot of fun. It highlights many of the take-aways that other CEOs have gleamed from the Jobs biography, including things like mastering communication among the team, motivating employees, and seeking perfection.

Thankfully, Prasad does not take the Steve Jobs emulation to the extreme highlighted by some of the CEOs in the article! It’s a fun read and worth checking out.

Posted in discussions, Entrepreneurship, OfficeDrop, Press coverage | No Comments »

The Internet is a Real Part of the Economy

March 29th, 2012 by Healy Jones

BCG has just released a report claiming that the internet “industry” is 4.7% of the US economy. (You can read about it on CNN here.)

The internet now contributed $684 billion to the US economy. That’s a lot!

The report also talks about the value of internet to small enterprises.”In multiple countries—including China, Germany, Turkey, and France—small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have engaged actively with consumers on the Internet also have experienced three-year sales growth rates up to 22 percentage points higher than those of companies with low or no Internet presence, according to the report.” (Read this here.)

At OfficeDrop, we believe that as cloud computing begins to be adopted by small businesses there will be a major improvement in productivity in the US. We look forward to helping business owners get more out of their cloud based tools and hope we can help you!

Posted in cloud computing | No Comments »

Small Business Innovation

March 28th, 2012 by Healy Jones

Sparking innovation in a small business isn’t just a matter of sitting around waiting for good ideas to pop into your CEO’s head. Innovation comes from a lot of places, and the right environment can turn all of your employees into idea generators.

Recently Karl Start and Bill Steward of Avondale Strategic Partners, a business advisory company, posted an article on Inc about reigniting innovation in a business (read it here). It was a great post that focused on getting ideas from the field – customers and employees who spend time with customers. The three principal actions they proposed were:

  1. Get cozy with customers
  2. Empower your team
  3. Execute fast and revise quickly

Excellent ideas and you should read the post. It also reminds us of a post that our CEO & resident cloud computing expert wrote a couple of years about entitled “4 Tips to Spark Innovation in Your Small Business.”

Prasad’s small business innovation ideas

Prasad’s ideas were different, but along the same lines as the executives from Avondale. Prasad said, “Small businesses are the major driver in both job growth and innovation in the United States. But when you are actually running a small business, finding the time to foster innovation can be overwhelmed by cash, economic, resource and time constraints. Here are four tips that I have found that foster innovation at my company and that I believe can be applied to most businesses.”

  1. Encourage all employees to solve company problems
  2. Allow individual employees time to work on a project of their choosing
  3. Provide employees experiences in every aspect of the company
  4. Consult customers for improvements and new ideas

Innovation can happen in a vacuum, but usually it is driven by the right work and team environment. We hope that another way you can generate innovative ideas to grow your small business is by letting the power of cloud computing free up your time and resources so that you can focus on solving problems for your customers.

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Market Research, Small Business | No Comments »

Specialized Cloud Services

March 26th, 2012 by Healy Jones

There is a great piece on CFO.com about the trend towards increasing specialization in cloud services. The author, Timothy Chou, makes a lot of good points about how end users will start to demand increasingly specialized cloud apps.  I attempted to leave a comment, but couldn’t get the captcha to show me any love, so here is my response:

My response to the  cloud specialization post

This is a really interesting post. I agree with the idea that end users/customers will be able to get increasingly specialized cloud software focused on a particular need.

I’m not sure if these specialized services will be provided by different vendors, or if there will be a few larger vendors who will offer different “flavors” for different end customers. I think we are going to see some large vendors trying to do a land-grab and offer many different industry solutions based on a common platform, and these will compete with other large players trying to offer a platform upon which specialized services will be built.

I actually think the platform approach will win because the biggest hurdle I see in the cloud space is the “testing” problem. Making sure a service works on all end devices and browsers and OS’s is very challenging. If a vendor tries to offer everything via different apps/flavors, they get hit with this huge QA/testing overhead. But with a platform approach, the large vendor can announce upcoming changes and let the smaller players who built ontop of the platform deal with QA, etc.

Posted in cloud computing | No Comments »

Forbes on the Cloud and Startups

March 26th, 2012 by Healy Jones

Another great article on how startups are using cloud computing to lower costs and launch products, this time on Forbes. Lightweight businesses can be created now without the need for expensive IT investment using cloud computing resources and SaaS services that are available on a monthly basis for no contract, at low prices.

Two key quotes from the article: “With the rise of cloud computing, we’re seeing more of a new breed of extremely lightweight company…”

and

“With so many low-cost resources at entrepreneurs’ beck and call, the groundwork is being laid for the next generation of businesses. Plus, the beauty of this extreme lightweight business model is that it isn’t just limited to startups. Innovators within larger enterprises, seeking to test or explore new markets, can also take advantage of cloud resources to assemble and package services for consumption by customers.”

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing | No Comments »

How Cloud Computing Helps Get Startups Off the Ground

March 23rd, 2012 by Healy Jones

I came across a cool write up on an HP blog about how small companies can get ahead of the game using cloud computing. It’s called “What Your Company Can Learn From Startups: How Cloud Computing is Helping to Get Them Off the Ground.”

Ok, so that’s a long title.

But the article is very solid.

cloud for smb

Basically, small companies can leverage the power of cloud computing to get the advantages of having a large IT department – without having to spend a lot of money. As the article states, “It’s where the cloud can be a business equalizer and help your small- or medium-sized business move to the next level by bringing in IT capabilities you may only have dreamed of in the past.” It goes on to talk about several startups and new products that companies have launched for very low costs by using cloud computing and outside cloud vendors. Great piece – check it out!

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Small Business | No Comments »

Cloud Computing Facts

March 21st, 2012 by Healy Jones

cloud computingWired has a great article entitled “Enough Already! The Cloud is Here to Stay“. They list some great facts in the post. A few that jumped out at me were (quoted from the piece):

  •  30% of small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) used cloud software in 2011.
  • 41 percent of senior executives say they are using or plan on using some kind of private cloud.
  • Cloud providers have increased personnel from nil in 2007 to over 550,000 in 2010.
  • 90 percent of Microsoft’s 2011 R&D budget was spent on cloud computing strategy and products.

Posted in cloud computing | No Comments »

Best Document Management – OfficeDrop a CODiES Award Finalist

March 19th, 2012 by Healy Jones

Codies awards for best document management officedropOfficeDrop is a CODiES 2012 finalist in the Document Management Category! This is big news!

The CODiEs are a very prestigious award presented by the Software and Information Industry Association that require a demo and testing by qualified judges. In the words of the SIIA: “The SIIA CODiE Awards recognize excellence in the business software, digital content, and education technology industries. All nominated products and services receive a thorough review from seasoned industry experts who can identify strengths and give significant insights for improvements.”

Best Document Management

We are really happy that the judges liked our vision for helping small businesses manage their documents in the cloud. Our app strategy resonated with them, and the commitment to keeping our apps updated was also an important factor.

Wish us luck in this great competition.

Posted in Awards, cloud computing, Customer Satisfaction, Document Management, OfficeDrop | No Comments »

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