What a great meeting we had last week!

Our two speakers were eagerly anticipated and they didn’t disappoint.

First up was Dave Sobel from EvolveTech in Washington DC.

The group voted for Dave to talk about cloud computing and his presentation looked at where computing has come from, where it’s going and what the opportunity is for IT companies such as AMITPRO members.

Dave started talking about the concept of cloud computing itself with bandwidth being a major driver in the current move to cloud computing and the different ways people deploy clouds whether that is a private, community, public or hybrid setup.

He also looked at topics that are very easily overlooked by people looking at getting into cloud services:

• Who owns the data?
• How easy is it to move to a different provider if needed?
• Are there any legal aspects to look at? (the US Patriot Act being one example)
• What are the limitations (printing and scanning for example)

After that Dave talked about some of the business opportunities and areas to take into consideration such as scalability and licensing before offering his opinions on his preferred suppliers and what he thinks about BPOS!

We then wrapped up with a Q&A session.

Dave’s slides will be available here shortly.

Next up was Susanne Dansey from Purple Cow Ideas Management.

Susanne is well known in the UK SBS community and it was great to have her first presentation to a user group since her return to the UK at AMITPRO.

The presentation was titled, “Who cares about your business” and Susanne said that the content was designed to make everyone feel a “little uncomfortable” (in a good way, the idea was that you’d really think about what you could do to improve your business)

The modern business world is a crowded place and there are lots of people all competing for the same customers, how do do you stand out? This is where the Purple Cow theme starts, by being remarkable (ala Seth Godin).

Susanne covered a lot of ground and talked about fostering a culture for innovation, ensuring your business scales well (processes and documentation!) and ensure you “knock down false walls” which are self made barriers to achieving goals (e.g. “I don’t have time to do it”).

Other ideas included:

Look to see how you can take advantage of existing products and services with the cow being an apt example – i.e. a cow can produce milk but with a little work you can also create cheese and butter.

Getting a product or service out “ugly and early” and asking for feedback is better than spending too much time trying to make something that is 100% perfect (it’ll probably never happen!)

It was a really great presentation and I don’t think any write up will do it complete justice!

Susanne’s slides are available here (complete with links to books Susanne has recommended)

Both presentations gave everyone plenty to talk about afterwards.

Thanks again to Dave and Susanne and to everyone who came.

See you in September!