RELO Roundtable…a gathering place

Until recently, when someone mentioned 'the Cloud', my thoughts tended to wander to that large, dark, ominous thing that's been hanging over the economy for the last few years.

That is until Curt Clements emailed me.

Clements is one of the founders and CEO of Move One, Inc., an integrated assignment and moving management company that provides global relocation, removal, and logistics services worldwide. They're headquartered in Dubai, UAE but operate two regional coordination centers located in Budapest, Hungary and Shanghai, China.

An RSS feed and link to their community blog are regular features included in the right sidebar at RELORoundtable.  Don't be fooled by their unconventional format. Move One has 51 locations in 37 countries on four continents.

Curt contacted me because of my ongoing interest in the development and use of new, innovative and collaborative technologies for the domestic moving and international relocation service industries.

His note invited me to take a look at how his company had been able to use the 'Cloud' to collaborate on and facilitate internal business processes to improve communications and customer service with both their international corporate clients and relocating assignees using the cloud hosting applications provided by Radix Technologies.

Radix is a Move One business partner and global provider of web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) SaaS applications for the moving and relocation industry.

Their RadixCloud that was just introduced in January is a new suite that offers cloud hosting solutions for both small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMB) in the moving (removal) and mobility service industries and large HR firms or international organizations hoping to reduce their operating expenses without compromising on reliability and performance.

The company's via™  service customer relationship management (CRM) options include viaRELO, viaEXPAT, viaMOVING and viaLOGISTICS applications.

Before I accepted the invitation to look 'under the hood', however, I thought I'd be a good idea to figure out what the 'Cloud' was exactly and why Curt and his associates thought the idea would have value to me and other RELORT visitors.

Fortunately, I was able to listen to a very in-depth explanation from some the IT industry's largest and most respected players who participated recently on the 2010 “Cloud Computing Power Panel” at the Javits Center in New York City. The video of this enlightening discussion is worth a listen if you have 40 minutes to spare.

For a less sophisticated but easier to understand explanation of the 'cloud', check out this much shorter video. 

Cloud Computing and the Federal Government

Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics of discussion in the technology sector today. According to the experts, it's expected to have a tremendous, "game-changing" impact on how IT is delivered in the future – particularly to service industries. Until recently, many potential users were leery of the Cloud because of privacy, security and stability issues. Many still are. Others are waiting to see how their competitors manage their information in the cloud.

Recently Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer, delivered a keynote presentation to the Brookings Institution on the "The Economic Gains of Cloud Computing" for the United States government. His comments support the President's initiative to reduce the tremendous overhead cost of the national IT structure by using the latest commercially available technology to move the American economy into 'the Cloud'.

Kundra's very energetic and aggressive long-term goal is to have government “engage with industry to collaboratively develop standards and solutions for cloud interoperability, data portability, and security.”

While the long-range objective is admirable, the federal bureaucracy in the U.S. has a reputation for having a hard time pulling up anchor on anything it's involved with. And even when they do, government administrators tend to drag their feet to get underway long after the hook's been yanked from the muck (i.e. MTTC/SDDC's protracted Families First pilot program implementation; and, DoD's problem-ridden DP3 initiatives that have been fifteen plus years in 'development').

Fortunately, some of the new blood in the federal and state governments have already started doing business in the cloud.

In September, 2009, the Federal government launched Apps.gov, a GSA operated site designed to be a storefront for approved cloud computing applications. Since it's introduction the site has become extremely popular because it features pre-approved software that government agencies, departments and contractors know are already compliant with various federally mandated policies.

Apps.gov holds the promise to streamline the complicated and complex federal procurement processes that can slow down government implementation and deployment. In fact, the U.S. Army now uses Salesforce.com, one of the very successful commercial application featured at the site, for it's new cloud-based recruiting efforts because of it's flexible, customizable, and extendable CRM tracking platform.

New Forum Added to Exchange Ideas

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about cloud applications, how to measure their performance or scalability, or even how to project the impact that this rapidly developing new technology will have on the domestic and international moving and storage, relocation move management, and global mobility service industries.

Given the level and frequency of the buzz, however, it seems prudent for the industry's captains, association leaders, and SMBs owners and mangers to learn as much as possible about some of the promises and benefits that can be realized by operating in the cloud.

Just jumping in with no clear understanding of what it is or how to get the most value out of the technology probably isn't a good idea. Avoiding or ignoring the concept, however, is not too smart either. It's coming. It's just a matter of when. And where. And how.

On that note, I'm openly inviting Mr. Clements and his associates (and, really, anyone else who wants an industry stump to stand on) to share their wisdom in a newly created 'Cloud Computing' thread that's been added under the General Discussion section of the RELORoundtable Forums.

The hope is that the commercially neutral learning environment of RELORT can be used to not only convey useful industry information and news but answer pertinent questions from interested users in the various new niche applications within the relocation community.

Anyone who wants to develop and post articles at RELORoundtable related to Cloud Computing, or any other domestic and international moving and storage, relocation move management, and global mobility service industry topic, is invited to submit your ideas and objectives to inforeloroundtable[at]gmail.com in order to publish your information.

Finally, a new RSS feed as been added in the right bottom right sidebar for David Linthicum's 'Cloud Computing' blog that appears in InfoWorld.

Mr. Linthicum is an internationally recognized technology industry expert, thought leader, author, lecturer and speaker who presents at many leading technology conferences on cloud computing, SOA, Web 2.0, and enterprise architecture. I've learned quite a bit about the cloud just digging through his old posts.

Seems the Cloud is going to become an important topic for the industry going forward. Whether you're an application designer/developer, current user, or just someone interested in learning about the technology, I hope RELORT can provide the right venue to exchange ideas and information for everyone's benefit.

Stay tuned!