Many in our community know Joe Foos, an executive at LanLogic in the San Francisco area. Joe’s firm is a traditional VAR that has grown up into a Cloud service Provider and Managed Service Provider, bringing over ten years of hosting experience (Microsoft Exchange in the SPLA program) to its area. I visited with Joe at the Cloud Expo conference last week in Santa Clara. “We are helping customers move off Exchange on-premises to hosted. Our expertise was helping firms migrate, etc.” Foos shared. He went on to deliver a fantastic speech titled “One Cloud, No Servers, Pure Joy” with the following insights:
After asking the audience what its experience was in eliminating ALL servers, Foos offered real world-isms about proper goal setting. He further talked about different departments having different goals. “Marketing might choose an easy cloud file-sharing option like DropBox, while Engineering might choose a more technical solution like buying their own NAS or small SAN that nobody else can use. IT loses control and the company loses a semblance of IT strategy or security and ends up having people do their own thing.”
Foos then showed how LanLogic, as a single throat to choke, is strategically a way to reign in all of this “non-sense.” He concluded with an Office 365 conversation. “Most of the conversation focused around showing possibilities and options but reminding audience that before deploying anything, they should assess their needs thoroughly and show different people and departments what it would look like for them.” What was interesting to me was that Foos hit one topic head-on in my conversation about Lync in SMB. “We’re having larger customer conversations about Lync at this show. To be honest, there aren’t many SMBs at Cloud Expo.”
