Preparing for change is necessary with technology, and in Peter High’s Technovation Column, SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon talks important trends facing CIOs and how these trends can help drive competitive advantage.
03-04-2013
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
Gaurav Dhillon was an early enterprise data integration success story. In 1993, he co-foundedInformatica at a time when data integration was not nearly the buzz-phrase it is today. He would lead that company for 12 years, and see it to a market capitalization of over $1 billion. (It’ market capitalization is currently nearly $4 billion.)
For an executive who has accomplished so much and seen his vision so fully realized, it is impressive to find that he is back at it again, pursuing a different vision in a related field as though he is an entrepreneur for the first time. Ben Horowitz wrote in his blog that he hates to fund new ideas from already successful entrepreneurs. He wrote, “Ordinarily, we would automatically disqualify an entrepreneur with such a massive financial success from funding, so when he came into pitch us on his new company…I was skeptical… our diligence found him working round the clock, running a hyper-intense environment and looking very much like a 20 year old entrepreneur on a mission from God.”
This new mission is SnapLogic, a commercial software company that provides data and application integration tools for connecting Cloud data sources. I recently interviewed Dhillon as part of the Forum on World Class IT series (access that interview here). As someone who has correctly read and shaped the technological zeitgeist, I was curious what excited him in terms of IT trends. There were three in particular that he focused on. None of them are new, but the nuance that he gave to each was enlightening.
Now that Cloud ROI is Proven, It is Time for the Cloud to Mature
Dhillon has assembled a CIO advisory board at SnapLogic, and posed a question to that group. “Which functional technologies are least likely to migrate to the cloud?” Dhillon says, “It was pretty unanimous: ERP would take a while and supply chain would take a while. Everything else can’t get there fast enough. That has less to do with technology. Companies like Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, these companies are doing a great service to the industry, helping people understand that cloud computing is appropriate for a wide array of old functions to the enterprise.”
The pace of change has been aided by the fact that the return on investment on cloud computing is getting easier to prove. In the early stages of its hype, CFOs were not big believers in this new way of doing things necessarily. Today, it is more widely appreciated that by moving an application to the cloud, less people are needed to rack and stack technology, demand for servers decrease, the need for cooling and power generation decreases as well, to take three prominent examples of costs savings. Cloud computing also renders one’s workforce more productive, as data is more easily accessible on multiple devices and can be made available in many settings. Dhillon stresses that the real opportunity is for CIOs and other IT executives is to make the case on this ROI, and then to plug the savings back into innovation.
Dhillon underscores the point by suggesting that CIOs need to be less “information officers” and more “integration officers.” He says that as CIOs, “you are an orchestrator of capabilities… [CIOs] should not be worrying about HR and payroll. You do need to worry about some things that are tailor-made and that are sources of competitive advantage, but anything that is a cost item that can be turned into to the cloud gives you more money to be innovative to do new things.”
Additional Trends Discussed in this Article are:
2. Data Analytics Will Separate the Best IT Executives From the Also Rans 3. “Mobility is a Monster”
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
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To listen to Gaurav Dhillon’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
