The Role

As part of a young fast growing leading technology supplier, based in the UK and Germany, your role will be crucial to the success of the company. Cloud Technology Solutions was formed in 2009 to take advantage of the evolutionary revolution known as cloud computing. We are looking for exceedingly talented customer facing professionals who have a strategic understanding of the IT marketplace and in particular, the premise of cloud computing and Google’s position and technology around their Google Apps platform. These roles will report directly in to the CEO, such is the importance of their standing. A very competitive package is being offered to attract the best.

From a technology perspective you will have a deep understanding of one or more legacy email systems such as Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell Groupwise. You will be trained in all things Google to equip you for your role and will work along side our VP’s of technology and development initially, however any knowledge that you currently have around Google Apps will be to your advantage.

We are looking for personalities whose values are as sincere as ours around value for money, customer care, green computing and a desire to change the IT paradigm of today. Your customer facing skills need to be exceptional and you will be operating around architectural design, implementation, pre and post sales support.

You will be based from home and equipped with everything you need to be successful in your role. A significant amount of travel will be involved both within the UK, Europe, USA and AsiaPAC.

The Detail

After undergoing training around Google Apps you will be expected to assist Sales on a daily basis. We have a methodology around the adoption process which involves proposal preparations, piloting systems, design and implementation of roll out and advice regarding ongoing support plus the use of any 3rd party tools that we resell around security and integration (which training is available for). You will often work alongside Google sales and technical so excellent teamwork skills are a must. You will also undergo training around our own Cloud Migrator Tool as we almost always use this during the pilot and implementation phases.

A knowledge of Help Desk tools would be advantageous as we also offer direct support to our customers and you would be expected to be involved especially during the next 12 months.

So what would a typical day look like?

After a period of induction and training, a typical day may consist of any (or all!) of the following tasks

• Visiting potential clients to present Google technology and our methodology regarding migration.
• Working from home preparing a proposal
• Meeting with colleagues from Google to plan a customer event or visit
• Planning a seminar or workshop and presenting to potential clients off site.
• Taking the odd support call from existing clients
• Helping to test functionality improvements in our tools and 3rd party tools we support
• Attending Google events
• Updating our marketing tools around presentations, webinars etc
  Organising and presenting webinars
• Meetings and conversations with other CTS employees

So what do we think a good candidate would look like?

You will have strong interpersonal skills with a balance between friendliness and firmness. You will possess much confidence in your own abilities and be open to being taught new things. You may have existing pre-sales experience although your personality is more important to us. Typical environments where we would expect to find good candidates might be members of special interest groups on social networks around messaging and collaboration. You may have an academic background involved day to day in running an academic IT network from a messaging and collaboration, user security point of view. A deep understanding of one or more legacy offerings will be very important. Our targets for migration include users of Microsoft, Novell and IBM. You will be measured and awarded based on customer satisfaction, your teamwork and of course your influence in helping us to migrate as many folks as possible to a cloud based solution including Google Apps.

The Company

Cloud Technology Solutions is a preferred (managed) partner of Google. It has deep expertise around migrating legacy messaging and collaboration users to Google Apps. It also offers complementary solutions around integration, security, archiving and storage. Our growth plans are aggressive to match the industries anticipated adoption of cloud computing (20% of the worlds commercial email to be in the cloud by 2012 according to Gartner). We have our own development capability and our Cloud Migrator Tool is proving to be one of the most successful approaches to migration out there. We currently have projects that span the globe so overseas travel will be required.

Google Apps

Make no mistake this is a very compelling solution to the problems of messaging and collaboration using existing legacy solutions. You will hear arguments around data security and other technology spokes in the wheel but they are fictitious. Nevertheless there is a challenge because this may mean significant change to organisations and you will always meet resistance to change! You will help us drive that change ( akin to stop asking people to build power generators and just use the socket in the wall!) and you must be skillful and able in that capacity.

Reward

These positions will go a long way towards our continuing growth and success. To that end we want to make that you enjoy that success with us, (and share some of the risk!).

A competitive base salary based on your experience, qualifications and general standing in the IT market place plus an attractive bonus package which could include stock options is on offer. This will be augmented by a company family medical plan, car allowances and pension contributions.

The Process

Suitable candidates will be initially tested on their technical prowess and that will be followed up by interviews with the sales staff and CEO and brought to a successful conclusion. All communication must be carried out through our recruitment consultants, GK recruitment.

Please quote CTS-TAM-WEB in all your communication. Good Luck!

GK Recruitment can be contacted on 0845 1239454 or email info@gkrecruitment.com.

Cloud computing per se is not a new technology or product. The National Institute of Standards defines it thus:-

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Then they go on to say

“Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time.”

So stay awake!

My version attempts to simplify this by asking some simple questions i.e.

Who is the Application Owner?

Who is the Data Owner?

Who is the Hardware Owner?

The answers to those questions or requirements will determine whether there is a need for access to a Public, Private, Hybrid or a Community Cloud. In the future its envisaged that organisations may need the use of all four different variants in the future and as our friends at NIST stated, its subject to evolving change. The enabling factors in all cases is the emergence of virtualisation as a tool and fast broadband anywhere from anything. Are you reading this BT?

The easiest to explain is the public cloud. This variant will dominate because of the ‘normalisation’ of messaging and collaboration through the use of Google, Facebook, eBay, online banking etc etc. and the equalisation of functionality between a home user and an ‘at work’ user ( sometimes the same person!). Gartner reckons that 20% of the worlds messaging will be in the public cloud by 2011. That’s a heck of a lot! Public cloud access requires a browser. That’s it.

All of the hardware, application, networking, storage and OS are provided by the vendor. I would argue that you would need some kind of identity management software if you didn’t already utilise such a thing. MyOneLogin is a proven SSO tool from the cloud which if you’re a Google Premier Apps user comes free. Other examples of public cloud are vendors such as Salesforce.com. This public cloud concept is also referred to as Software as a Service or SaaS. In this case you should be the data owner i.e. if ever you decide to switch this service off and go elsewhere then your agreement or SLA should state that you will get your data back in a form that is readable and transferrable. Finally,  although also referred to as Public Cloud you will also see public clouds dedicated to large groups of users only, for example the US Government. In my opinion this is the route the NHS should have taken for patient records rather than the £30 billion pounds of spend devoted to BT and the other SI’s and partners which will fail. However I digress again!

Lets tackle the next one which is a private cloud. This is for organisations that need to be assured that the data lives in a unique, known space. A private cloud can live on or off premise and can be managed either by yourself or by a 3rd party. This form of cloud is popular with vendors who still want to sell you lots of tin and software licences, still but its definition is governed by the fact that the only data in this cloud belongs to the organisation. Typical vendors are IBM, HP, Oracle and eventually all of the other suspects.

Ok next up is a hybrid cloud. This is where there is a combination of 2 or more private, public and community clouds that are bound together by technology for reasons of data and application portability. Think of it as it being much the same as integrating your messaging system with your ERP or CRM system on premise, except it isn’t!!

Finally the community cloud. This is a cloud shared by several organisations that have a common purpose Examples could be a government and its various departments, a charity and its donors etc etc. It could be managed by the organisations themselves or a 3rd party and can be on or off premise.

Ok the other buzz phrases you are likely to come across are PaaS or Platform as a service and IaaS or Infrastructure as a service. Both would sit in a cloud environment and could be any of the variants listed above. PaaS refers to suppliers that offer a platform such as programming language and application builders on their infrastructure for the customer to build their own customised applications. The customer may have some control over the hosted environment but does not control the underlying infrastructure i.e. OS, storage, memory, network et al

IaaS is where the customer needs to provision and de-provision additional infrastructure for their own use i.e. choice of OS, CPU, memory, storage and some network. Although the underlying infrastructure is controlled by the vendor, the customer has the perception of infinite growth and instant switch on and off of resources. This environment is proving increasingly popular with customers who have specific pains around software testing, big on and off projects, drug research etc etc. Typical suppliers are Amazon,GoGrid and Rightspace.

Why go for any of these clouds?

Well whichever cloud is of interest they all present several advantages as to how to do IT today. Its very compelling and disruptive especially to the legacy computer vendors whose go to market and value chains are under serious threat.

So what does it provide then?

Economies of scale i.e. computing and networking power on a massive scale which has to be protected and ran with ultimate investment in security and speed.

Elasticity i.e. like the electricity supply coming out of your wall, take as much as you need when you need it, easily.

Financially i.e. potentially move IT spend from Capex to Opex.

Accessibility i.e. capture your information from any device i.e. mobile, netbook or anything that supports a browser

Security. Yes I would argue that most organisations will put their data in a more secure environment than they currently have. It doesn’t matter how much you have spent on security software and hardware if you give out USB sticks, CD’s, floppies (I’m showing my age again) and yes laptops and phones. Read the papers!!