通过

When Success is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

  • 项目

 

When
Success is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

 

A lot of people
run a race to see who's the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.

Steve Prefontaine

It takes guts and a lot of
hard work to be a successful runner.   At my alma
mater, University of Notre Dame (go Irish!), I ran cross-country and was lucky
enough to be chosen to captain my team and as an All American.  Back then, my job was to get my teammates performing
at their very best, since a team of seven runners is only as good as its top
five times.  Our training regime included
running as much as 100 miles per week, twice a day workouts in the heat of
summer and the cold of Northern Indiana winters.  Some people might ask, what would motivate
anyone to do that?  For me, it's simple. I
love competition and the hard work that is necessary to compete at the highest
level. 

 

Today,
I speak with businesses around the world to better understand their needs and
help guide them to the cloud on their terms. 
I work with everyone from government agencies to large enterprises -
organizations such as Starbucks, McDonalds, Volvo, the State of California and the
United States Department of Agriculture. 
In many respects, my early days as an All-American distance runner were
good preparation for my current role where I lead the team that's focused on selling
Microsoft Online Services to businesses around the world. 

 

There's
been a lot of buzz about the cloud - what it is, how it can transform IT, lower
costs and accelerate innovation.  Sorting
through it all is no easy feat.  At
Microsoft, despite the short term industry hype around the cloud, we have a
long term strategy to deliver our industry-leading productivity solutions as a
service.  This requires planning,
commitment, investment, understanding and, yes, guts.  In essence, delivering world class
productivity solutions and helping organizations successfully move to the cloud
on their terms is a marathon, not a sprint. 

 

I
talk to hundreds of business leaders every year, and in those discussions,
there are five key themes I consistently hear that are top of mind for them
about the cloud:

 

1.      
Are you a service
provider or a business partner?  
Whether they're moving everything or nothing to the cloud, the customers
I speak to all want one thing - a partner.  They want someone who understands their business
and is invested in helping them use technology to move it forward.  It's one thing to sign a contract and declare
victory that a business "bought" your service. 
It's another to help a customer actually move to the cloud, realize
their business goals and become a trusted partner.  At Microsoft, we partner closely with
customers and stick around to see that deployments are successful.

2.      
What's
your long term commitment?   It's more
important than ever for businesses to make the most of their IT spend, and
businesses want to ensure they'll be supported over the long haul.  In fact, many customers ask to have this
stated in their contract.  Cloud adoption
is still in the early phases, so it's not surprising businesses want assurances
that they - and the solutions they're buying - are a priority and not a marketing
slogan.  At Microsoft, productivity is
our wheelhouse and is something we take very seriously.

3.        What if I'm not ready to move everything to
the cloud? I have yet to speak to an enterprise customer who thinks it is realistic
to move 100% of their computing to the cloud. 
This is particularly true for industries that have regulatory/compliance
requirements, many back end legacy systems or complex business needs.  These organizations need a strategy for how
the cloud meets their business goals without disrupting the complex
environments they run every day. 
One-size-fits-all rarely works and user computing is much broader than
browser or no browser.  People that would
try and convince you that the rich client is irrelevant and all data will
ultimately move to the cloud may be interesting, but they're not well informed.  Gartner Research provides a welcome reality
check, "the big rush to cloud e-mail and collaboration services will not be
visible in earnest until 2012 to 2014. When the migration is virtually
complete, we expect that two-thirds of enterprises will have moved to primarily
using cloud e-mail and collaboration services." (Source: Gartner Inc., "E-Mail and
Collaboration in the Cloud", Tom Austin, 30 July 2010.)  That means email,
often the most likely application to move to the cloud, will still have
one-third of enterprises using it on premises - along with a variety of other
systems.  At Microsoft, we help customers
move to the cloud at the pace that works for them, providing deep integration
with whatever applications they have on premises.

4.        What do you do to ensure my privacy and
security?   Customers
need to be able to trust that their data is secure and private.  These aren't nice to haves; they're must
haves.  At Microsoft, we take several
important steps in this area, including providing always-up-to-date
antivirus and anti-spam solutions to protect email; safeguarding data with
geo-redundant, enterprise-grade reliability and disaster recovery datacenters; and
providing best-of-breed data centers and cloud services with SAS 70 as well as
ISO 27001certification.

5.     
What does
the future hold?   Having been
a former CIO, I know that no one wants to be blindsided by their technology
vendor.  Businesses want to understand whether
you put money behind your service going down, what your long term roadmap is,
how you plan to improve the service over time, what your plans to
publish APIs are and if you support industry standards that are fully
interoperable.  This points to a deeper
need that customers have around transparency. 
I'm very proud of the work we've done here.  At Microsoft we've provided early disclosure
of pre-reqs,
published root cause analysis for issues, and delivered on interoperability
standards.

 

Microsoft has been delivering world
class productivity solutions for more than 30 years.  In that time, we've learned a lot about helping
people do more with less, and our results show it.  People are choosing Microsoft Office hands
down.  Office 2010 is the most
popular version of Office in history and more than 30 million people now use
Office Web Apps.  More than 15 million
people now use Live@edu, our
cloud suite for education.  The number of
businesses on the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) more than tripled
last year, and the Office 365 limited
beta was over-subscribed within 24 hours.

Our
commitment to delivering the best productivity solutions on the planet is clear,
and the number of organizations who are choosing Microsoft is truly gratifying. 

 

Any
serious athlete will tell you that champions are made when no one is
watching.  When the noise dies down and
the crowds thin out, all that's left is your will to win and the long stretch
of road ahead.  That is the time I like
best.  Time to listen.  Time to focus.  Time to work hard.  And time to run.

 

Ron
Markezich
Corporate
Vice President, Microsoft Online

Comments