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LANINGHAM: I'm Scott Laningham talking with IBM champions.
I'm joined this time by John McDonald, an IBM champion for Rational software.
John is a 20-year veteran of IBM and cofounder of CloudOne,
the first IBM Rational Business Partner to offer software as a service
and cloud hosting to Rational customers.
John, welcome to the podcast.
MCDONALD: Thank you.
Hey, Scott.
It's great to see you.
LANINGHAM: It's good to see you again.
We chatted at Innovate last summer, didn't we?
MCDONALD: We did.
It seems like 1,000 years ago, but it was only a few months, wasn't it?
LANINGHAM: It was, it was.
So much goes by so fast.
Talk to us about CloudOne, for those that haven't seen that earlier discussion.
What are you all about, and what led to it?
MCDONALD: Right.
So, CloudOne is really the first and only -- still only in many cases --
provider of cloud computing services just for IBM Rational customers.
What that really means is we help you take your Rational software development tools,
whatever that may be to you, and move them into not only the cloud so they can be delivered
on demand globally, but also help you turn them into a more on demand managed service either
by licensing things, your rental model, or by providing you some of the skills you need on top
of that to make it all sort of magically happen for you so you can just go
about making great software instead of concentrating
on managing the tools that you bought.
LANINGHAM: Well, I don't know how people would get any business done
without the help of companies like yours, right?
[ LAUGHTER ]
MCDONALD: Yes.
Well, you know, a good friend of mine in IBM says that IBM Business Partners exist
because there's some sort of flaw in IBM and the partner exists to exploit that flaw.
And though I don't probably go as far as to say that we're exploiting a flaw in IBM,
I will say that we're really providing what I think is a very necessary service for companies.
Because again, most organizations are not really about making software; you may be,
if your job is to write and sell software.
But a lot of companies make cars or run hospitals or they manage money
or they do something that is not about building software.
And for them, it's a matter of giving us the tasks that they don't really want to do
which is manage that environment so they can go about writing and creating good software.
LANINGHAM: Well, you might even say, to paraphrase from a different statement
from somebody else in a different setting, it takes a village to raise a company.
[ LAUGHTER ]
MCDONALD: It does, it does.
LANINGHAM: Really, you know.
It takes a lot of parties with different specialties coming together
to make an economy work.
Now, what about your connection to Rational software?
When did that come about, and what do you guys use in particular?
MCDONALD: When I was at IBM I had lots of different job roles,
but one of them was leading technical sales for Rational for North America.
I hadn't been in Rational prior to its acquisition and didn't really know much about it
when I came there, but over the course of several years and leading that team I came
to not only understand but frankly, respect the approach
that IBM Rational takes to software development.
It's quite different than what the other vendors in this space do.
IBM Rational is more about managing the process of how software comes to be,
not necessarily just the writing of it which is part of it, but not really all of it.
And what I mean by that is managing the requirements, there are pieces of code
that are being written by people and what kind
of configuration they're in and where they're stored.
Things about the quality and performance of that code, about packaging and building
and deploying, all these sorts of tasks that are necessary for software
to become, or what IBM really focuses on.
And so that sort of broad approach is not only very appealing to me,
but frankly to Rational customers.
I mean, they're still the market leader and growing because of that sort
of holistic approach to software development.
And so, it was kind of a natural when you're looking at what you want to bring to the cloud.
As you look across the IBM portfolio certainly there are plenty
of things that can be cloud delivered.
But it's sort of this environment of software development completely built
and managed and delivered to you on demand.
It's a very compelling thing to do in software development.
So, it was kind of a natural fit.
LANINGHAM: That's great.
I think about, you know, we mentioned we talked at Innovate last summer
and there's always big announcements at conferences and news throughout the year.
You know, trends, different things happening,
changes in just the market and the technology constantly.
Are there things in particular in the cloud space and in the work your company is doing
since we last talked, I think it was last June, right?
Any news and trend shifts since then?
MCDONALD: Yes.
One of the most exciting things that's happening with us is we sort
of taken a step beyond just taking existing Rational customers and moving them to the cloud
and really creating what you might call cloud special offerings --
in other words, things that really couldn't exist unless you had software tools being
delivered from the cloud.
Let me give you an example of that.
IBM Rational has a great product called Insight, and Insight is based on IBM Cognos
which is a business analytics tool.
In other words, if you are a grocery store and you had thousands of bits of data
about what companies...what customers were scanning, milk and eggs and whatever,
and you had all this data and you wanted to analyze it and get some sort of sense
about what's going on, you use analytics tools like Cognos to do that.
And so what Rational did was they took the Cognos engine and they pointed it
at software development, and they said let's take all these data points about what's going
on in software development, how long it takes to do certain things, how certain things perform
or don't perform, and then build into it some standard reports that did you some insight --
hence, the name -- into what's going on in your software development process.
Now, for very large companies, you know, like the Citibanks of the world,
that's a pretty easy case to make.
That's a good thing, a good investment in making and understanding your software development.
We can pay back pretty quickly, you know, if I do some improvements based on what I've learned.
But for the smaller organization it's a harder case to make.
It's a fairly expensive tool and once you sort of learn certain things about it it's hard
to justify unless you're doing a tremendous amount of software development, installing
and owning a tool to give you insight about that because they're ROI case is hard to make.
And so, what we're working on is offering that on demand --
in other words, instead of buying that you friends, if you will,
and entire Rational insight environment sort of by the month and point it
at your own environment and have it download the information, chew through it,
give you the reports back as a service.
Instead of owning it, you rent the service and get the result.
Now, that should open up the use of that kind of sophisticated technology to a much broader group
of customers that can't necessarily afford the purchase of it and in fact really couldn't exist
as an offering unless you have the cloud and Software as a Service to be able to do it.
Right? So, we've explored a lot of those different things over the summer
and are building some pretty exciting sort of joint projects with IBM Rational
to do those sort of new ways of bringing the technology to unique new audiences.
LANINGHAM: That's great, that's really interesting, John.
As a champion, one of the things you're recognized for is community leadership.
And let's talk to the second about your community involvement,
user groups, forums and that type of thing.
And how has it helped you building stronger relationships with customers
and just for your business in general?
MCDONALD: Well, I'll answer the question two ways.
First of all, CloudOne could not exist as a company if we hadn't built and don't continue
to tend and feed relationships and collaborative conversations with people outside of CloudOne.
My business model, we don't have a services team at CloudOne.
I don't have the traditional consultants that are used to do billable hours.
Instead, what I rely on is the other existing Rational Business Partners
to provide those services.
Now, they benefit from that as they do their business
and I benefit from collaborating with them.
And so, literally everything that we do a CloudOne, be it asking a question
about an installation problem or in working together on a joint problem or opportunity,
or getting someone involved in answering a support question is
in fact a community collaborative thing.
And so, it goes for us beyond just data, SameTiming,
instant messaging, emails and forums.
It's actually in the DNA of our business, and quite candidly, we couldn't exist without it.
In today's world there's no way that I can hire all of the engineering support
that would be necessary to know everything that there is to know about even all
of these Rational products, let alone
if I expanded my business to include other technologies.
There's just no way to hire all those people with all that knowledge.
And so, the only way to get it is to collaboratively participate in communities
where those people exist and are willing to talk with you and strategize about what you're doing.
And I think that I'm not alone in being in a small business
and recognizing the power of the community-based approach.
I think that companies, larger corporations, are starting to wake up to the idea that the folks
that they employ are not always experts on anything, and that there's huge value and kind
of opening the door to a much more open and collaborative approach
that maybe has been the way small businesses have been able to survive
and now is changing the larger organizations.
LANINGHAM: Yes.
MCDONALD: So, the bottom line is that it's really baked in to our DNA and we can exist
without that kind of collaboration that you're talking about.
LANINGHAM: Do you want to quickly mention critical forums
or user groups that you participate in?
MCDONALD: Oh, yes.
Well, we're all over developerWorks.
Everybody in my organization has a developerWorks ID
and we actually have a private group in there where we store a lot
of our own collaborative documents and kind of use the IBM system to be able to do it.
We're also sponsors of several of the Rational user groups all over the country,
kind of the lead sponsor and driver behind them -- again, an opportunity for us to collaborate
with a community and certainly share and explore what it is that we do but also learn
from what they're doing to make our own services better.
But, you know, we're part of the customer cloud council that was formed by IBM.
We've got active participation with all kinds of different analyst communities as well.
But I'd say that the IBM-sponsored ones are probably our biggest and best in that space.
LANINGHAM: Any other places you turn for technical information,
critical places that are sources for you?
MCDONALD: Yes, I would say that beyond that, we go frequently to some
of the specific councils that have come up.
I mentioned one just a second ago, this Customer Cloud Standards Council
that was created by IBM and others.
And that is trying to drive a set of consistent standards -- hence the name --
into the cloud community to allow more interoperability
between different cloud installations.
You see, the problem today is that if I have your development tools in my cloud and you want
to use a different cloud to say, once you're done building that software, deployed and run it
in that cloud -- which is something I don't do but other companies do --
there's no standards of discussion between these two clouds.
There's no communication standards for deploying software or whatever that exists today.
And so, it's a huge problem for creating these inter-clouds and this interoperability,
and this council was created as an example to help drive some of those standards.
And so, we go to that council and we talk with others that are similar in style to be able
to put our own input in and learn from others as well.
LANINGHAM: Very cool.
John, anything that in particular you really love to do outside of all of this?
I mean, cool hobbies or anything like that?
MCDONALD: Yes, well, I love writing.
I have written a couple of books.
You can go on Amazon.com and find them.
John P. McDonald, a couple of history books.
And of course, the other thing that I'm active with like so many people my age is my family.
So, beyond doing this CEO stuff and writing, I love being at home with them.
LANINGHAM: John, thanks so much for chatting with us today, this has been great.
MCDONALD: You're welcome, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
LANINGHAM: Again, John McDonald is cofounder of CloudOne,
and you can find out more at oncloudone.com, right?
MCDONALD: That's right, thanks.
LANGINGHAM: oncloudone.com.
I'm Scott Laningham talking with IBM champions.
Thanks for listening.
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