Avanade CEO: “Cloud Brings A World Of Opportunity For Enterprises”

CRNtv sat down with two of Avanade Inc.’s top executives to discuss the myriad of opportunities that are presented to businesses upon making the switch to cloud. “One of the main things about getting your systems to the cloud is that you open up the availability to see a lot of data, and not just the data in your enterprise, but also data from other enterprises in this ever-connected world,” said Adam Warby, CEO of Avanade, Inc. In doing this, he said, cloud provides customers with the ability to track information and get access to data that otherwise would unavailable. When asked why companies should move their core systems into the cloud, Warby responded with a few key reasons. First, he said, cloud providers are the first to be innovating in the cloud. “This topic of innovation is critical to companies as they rethink the industry they are in and the business they’re in. Moving to the cloud opens up the access to not just the system that they might have had on-premise, but also, all of the services that are being provided outside,” said Warby. He went on to mention that it is really about the idea of a company’s ecosystem expanding. “Getting into the cloud allows you to really access those ecosystems.” Mick Slattery, President of North America at Avanade, spoke about how enterprises are both capitalizing on and growing from the opportunities presented with cloud. “There are a number of different ways cloud is being leveraged by enterprises. We talk about digital a lot, and I would argue that most of the digital applications you see have some element of cloud underpinning them,” said Slattery. “We see a lot of new customer interactions and new smartphone applications, for example, that tend to have some level of cloud behind them.” Slattery also explained that there are new classes of applications that are leveraging cloud software. IoT, or, Internet of Things, is just one. “There are other classes of apps that I don’t think we’ve started to see yet around, like artificial intelligence and machine learning, which are things that are just starting to come to the fold,” he said. Ultimately, both Slattery and Warby agree that by using cloud, companies are successfully able to redefine the existing set of applications that they’re already using. “Cloud is just an enabler,” said Slattery. “It really allows you to make the most out of what you’re doing.”