Interview with Sam Somashekar: Intelligently Using Cloud for Business Growth

Sam Somashekar, Chateaux Cloud Expert

Sam began his career at CA Technologies as a software developer, where he eventually brought his extensive software engineering experience to the strategic and tactical level as Senior Director, Project Management. He then took on the role of VP of Marketing and Business Development at Kaavo, a cloud management software and services company. Most recently, Sam was VP of Marketing at Sefaira, a sustainable building design software company,  where he was recruited to create marketing strategy, build a global market presence, secure customer acquisition, and drive demand generation. Currently, Sam serves as Cloud  Strategy and BI Organizational Readiness Expert for Chateaux, helping to grow our Cloud and Big Data service offerings.

Read on for Sam’s answers to these commonly asked questions about cloud, or click here to watch a video of the interview!

Q: Where is the right place to start with a cloud initiative in your organization?

A: Cloud Computing and Big Data have become household names within every industry. But even after several years, organizations are still wrestling with how to effectively integrate cloud strategy and technology within their business goals and current IT landscape. We’ve been helping clients to identify an area that requires help, and involve cloud technology as part of solution definition. Cloud can be used as a business platform, and a technology platform in a variety of ways including:

– Sales effectiveness
– Marketing automation and insight
–  IT optimization
– Increase speed to market for your products and solutions

Q: Once you have made a cloud investment, how can you get better ROI from it?

A: It is important to design a solution that includes a way to monitor and measure success. You must clearly identify your goals across each iteration of solution delivery, including cost savings, productivity improvements in getting new products to market or optimizing time spent on tasks, or connecting the dots between new data intelligence and incremental revenue or brand recognition.

Q: What cloud technologies should you consider for your organization?

A: There are many cloud technologies for infrastructure, platform, software, and business process, such as Big Data (e.g. Hadoop), Business Intelligence, and various cloud deployment, management, and automation solutions. You have to understand the capabilities, nonfunctional requirements such as performance and maintainability, and SLA requirements in order to select the right tools for your organization.

Q: How can you use the cloud to aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources, such as social media, company web site activity, or email marketing?

A: With the growth of social media, valuable product and business data is being collected every minute, whether you like it or not. It’s important to get in front of that by tracking this structured and unstructured data, and then analyzing this mountain of information in meaningful ways to the business. There are many sales and marketing automation solutions that can help you do all of this, while further aligning this information with internal data for more meaningful insights.

Q: What are the benefits of centralizing prospect and customer engagement information?

A: By centralizing prospect and customer engagement information in solutions such as CRM, you gain better insight into your current and future customers. This allows you to better target the right products and services to the right prospects, better tailor customer service, which leads to a better overall customer experience and ultimately more revenue and a stronger brand.

To learn more about Chateaux’s Cloud services, visit our website at http://chatsoft.wpengine.com/solutions/cloud-solutions-landing.asp.