The recession is over – it’s in the news so it must be true. Here in the Fronde offices we’ve seen a renewal of interest in the transformative potential of the cloud, as our clients in New Zealand and overseas lift their gaze from day-to-day cost control and start thinking about innovation again.
One of the most interesting questions we’ve heard recently is: what’s the next type of business application to move into the cloud? We’re all comfortable with email and collaboration in the cloud now, as we’re demonstrating by moving all our internal mail (and NZ Post’s!) to Gmail. But what’s next? We think the answer lies in ERP and CRM. So do Netsuite, and this month we formed a new partnership with Netsuite to implement and licence their ERP-in-the-cloud product.
Our Principal Consultants have been in hot demand too this month, with James Valentine (our Cloud Guru) speaking at the KANZ Broadband Summit and at Auckland University about the near-term and long-term changes that he predicts for how we structure and implement platforms. James’s recent post about the Cloud Computing Continuum has been picked up by the blogs, too. Dominic Stow discussed his experiences with successfully implementing the PRINCE2 project methodology with the Institute of Management Consultants, which included a grand finale involving him waving the (not insubstantial) PRINCE2 manual around. He says the latest PRINCE2 version has taken a massive leap forward. Having recently completed my own MSP certification, I agree – the new versions of both can even be called agile (more on that later).
