Providers of cloud-based services and customized applications can do a great service by paying closer attention to how their customers do business; this according to the diverse group of technology end-users in the End User Commission Meeting held Monday, August 1, at CompTIA ChannelCon 2016.
“Everyone does a great job of selling what the cloud does and everyone does a poor job of explaining what the limitations are,” said Joe Priestly, IT manager for Cornbelt Energy, a not-for-profit electric cooperative serving 35,000 homes and businesses across 18 counties in central Illinois. “A little openness would go a long way to making this a smoother process.”
Priestly and other members of the commission said they are generally supportive of and benefit from cloud-based solutions. But commission members also added several caveats, mainly related to negative impacts on their business operations.
In some instances, it’s the result of a solution provider’s lack of understanding of the ebb-and-flow of the customer’s business.
Cathy Johnson, chief administrative officer and chief financial officer for Terry Lockridge & Dunn, a provider of tax, accounting and consulting services in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, related her experience with a recent, major upgrade from a cloud provider.
“It was updated and changes [were] forced on us at a time of year when CPAs are extremely busy,” she recalled. “And they hadn’t worked out all of the bugs. It took three months to work out the bugs.”
For Bill Sanborn, director of IT for LFB USA, a Framingham, Massachusetts biopharmaceutical firm, issues stem from the one-size-fits-all mindset of many technology providers.
“If an application is used in the manufacturing process, it might impact product quality or patient safety,” he explained. “I need to be able to have control over when changes are made and how they are made. That’s critical for the environment that I am in.”
Sanborn said vendors that understand his business offer the option to test and vet proposed changes in a sandbox before changes and updates are rolled out.
“The better experiences I’m having with the cloud are with vendors that are specific to our industry, rather than the ones selling a one-size-fits-all to everybody in the world,” Priestly said.
Commission members also said work need to be done when it comes to the technical support offered by cloud providers and app developers. Too often the knowledge base among the technical support people is lacking.
“We’re figuring it out and [are] teaching them,” said Joel Sorensen, senior IT leader at Hantover, a provider of food processing and industrial supplies headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. “They need to do a better job of understanding the functional details of how we are doing business.”
