Ben Kepes is a Canterbury-based entrepreneur and professional board member. It’s all about the cloud.
OPINION: I am an old guy. As such, I have somewhat traditional views on how to do things.
Take for example building financial freedom for an individual. My view is that it’s done over time – by building a good foundation, making calculated choices, smoothing out the inevitable peaks and troughs, etc.
This is contrary to the get-rich-quick approach that sees people jumping on the next big thing (bitcoin, anyone?)
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Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is credited with saying that “most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years”.
It is a wise saying and seems valid regardless of the context in which it is used.
Whether we’re talking about building a high performing team, changing the culture of an organization, or changing the way of thinking of a company, while individual inflection points are certainly one thing, change over a longer period of time is where the magic really happens.
In no time, people became totally relaxed about using the cloud, says Ben Kepes.
Gates is a smart guy, and I often find myself in situations where I get frustrated with a lack of progress, only to step back and look at progress over a longer period of time and wonder how far we’ve come, in fact, came.
I was thinking about this longer-term perspective recently while attending a board meeting. The organization in question, like most organizations, is struggling with an existing technology paradigm.
Like all organizations, technology (especially software) powers the organization’s back-end processes and modernizing that software is part of the key to unlocking growth, progress, customer centricity and all that. a good company wants to achieve.
I listened to the board meeting as the management team and the board discussed technology priorities. One of those priorities was moving from an on-premises model to a SaaS model of software delivery.
My heart skipped a beat and I had to pinch myself as it became apparent how far we’ve come in about 15 years.
You see, around 2006, when Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services were just tiny fledgling tech companies, and Xero was just a glimmer in the eye of co-founder Rod Drury, I decided to make a career change.
It saw me become a tech industry analyst, a sort of vague role that sees an individual spend their working life observing what’s going on with both tech vendors and customers. My particular interest was cloud computing.
At that time, and this is no exaggeration, only a small number of people had an idea of what cloud computing was. Notions like this were utterly foreign within the boardroom, generally misunderstood in tech departments, and utterly ignored by consumers.
But as this quote from Bill Gates says, fast forward a little over a decade and people are totally relaxed sharing photos in the cloud, collaborating on documents in the cloud, and taking advantage of software provided by the cloud to the browser on their desktop, laptop or mobile device. We have really come a long way.
Provided
Change over a longer time scale is where the magic really happens, says Ben Kepes.
Now, I wouldn’t suggest for a nanosecond that I was, at the time, prescient. I simply, as is my style, jumped from one random “quarry” onto another path in order to investigate something interesting. There was no calculation in my choice, it was simply, to quote the words of Robert Frost, a case where: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled, And it made all the difference.
Anyway, the reason for this article is not to reflect on everything I’ve done, but rather to express my amazement at the cloud computing revolution in the world and to offer some congratulations to those who foresaw this change. People like Andy Jassy, creator of Amazon Web Services, or Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, are the most prescient.
To recognize how far I’ve come, I thought I’d put out a video I made about a decade ago, back when the cloud was still a little-known and even less-used term.
It’s almost weird to think that once upon a time there was a random Kiwi who had to make a video to explain what cloud computing was. Enjoy it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcQQ2U_VBWI
#cloud #computing #revolution