CRN recently sat down with a group of leading players from across the cloud and hosted services sector to discuss the current state of the market, the maturing of the sector, challenges for the channel making the transition, as well as the persistent doubts and perceived barriers to entries on the customer side. Participants delivered a compelling account of an exciting and disruptive market with abundant opportunities for those companies smart and brave enough to jump on board.
ATTENDEES
Jason Gomersall, iSeek
Managing director
Hugh Smith, iSeek
General manager
Nathan Wegener, Cerner Corporation,
Snr director, technical and managed services
Brian Pereira, CN Group,
Chief executive officer
Andrew Tucker, ITonCloud,
Chief executive officer
Nick Beaugeard, HubOne, CTO
Ian Kinsella, QBT Consulting,
Business development manager
Andrew Sjoquist, ASE IT,
Chief executive officer
Peter Doubaras, Data People,
Chief operating officer
CRN Cloud has been a buzzword for the past several years, but there’s still no clear definition for it. Nick, how do you define the cloud?
Nick Beaugeard We started doing cloud in 2009, shortly before it was actually called ‘the cloud’. I was at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC and a friend of mine who worked for HP said, “Nick, come here.” He showed me this HP server in the corner and said, ‘That’s a cloud server’!
So in 2011 I was really excited when the National Institute of Science and Technology in the US actually released a definition of cloud. These are the five essential characteristics. One, it needs to be ‘on-demand self-service’, meaning I don’t have to talk to a human to have something provisioned. ‘Broad network access’ basically means that it works over the internet.
‘Resource pooling’ means that I can share resources across multiple devices; it’s not one device per customer. ‘Rapid elasticity’ means that I can expand without waiting four weeks to get another server, and a ‘measured service’ means that people pay for what they use. So instead of provisioning for maximum capacity, you can expand or detract.
CRN Nathan, we were talking about the myriad barriers there are for Australian businesses that want to be in the cloud. What do you think are the biggest barriers and how do you go about addressing them?
Nathan Wegener Security and privacy are the biggest concerns. There’s ownership of the data and the trust factor and dealing with companies that they haven’t necessarily worked with before in a way they haven’t before as well. You can get to the C-level suite, but then to progress the conversation at the client level, we have to talk to their technical experts, and then that means that they are surrendering their role within their organisation, and they’re not overly anxious to do that.
CRN To what degree do you think these fears are founded or unfounded in the business community?
Nathan Wegener I think that on the whole, they are pretty well founded in terms of the security incidents. My clients are very risk averse. Being in the health sector you basically spend your life trying not to be in the newspaper, and yet every time there is something in the paper it’s very bad for them, and this is a perceived increased risk. Our conversations are a lot about showing we’ve mitigated the security risks.
CRN Brian, what sort of conversations are you having with your customers about security and the revised privacy laws in particular? Is there much awareness of their new responsibilities?
Brian Pereira We’ve gone the full circle. We went to our lawyers to get an understanding of what they knew about the new privacy laws and unfortunately, they didn‘t know much. On 12 March next year, these eight new principles come into play and it gives the Privacy Commission quite broad reaching powers to find and prosecute breaches.
Whether the commissioner does that or not is yet to be seen, but in terms of the laws they actually have changed the way we can access and give permission or give organisations permission to access your information.
Where it affects our industry is that it forces us to then think about where the data is held; if it’s held overseas, are you exchanging data with organisations outside Australian territory? You have to declare all those things and make that information available to your customers so that they can query that information and request to change it and put parameters around who has access to that information. For a medium business like ourselves, that is quite a lot of work. Similarly for any organisation that would have to set up that whole set of new rules.
CRN Do you feel that customers are still concerned about data jurisdiction or is there some complacency slipping in there?
Brian Pereira There is a lot of rumour and innuendo around what is data privacy. You hear about the Patriot Act in the US, for example. A fairly generic Act to prevent terrorism, big news in Australia to prevent outside vendors – American or European – from hosting personal data, financial data health records overseas. In actual fact if you looked at the coordination between the US government and Australia, there isn’t actually any data that we wouldn’t hand over if we were asked. So those types of things make it very confusing for a customer to make a decision when it comes to sensitive information.
Jason Gomersall If we talk about the jurisdiction issue, that’s where we see growth in the data centre market. Why have data centres in Brisbane and Melbourne when you really only need them in Sydney? [But] customers do want them in their geographic locations, particularly government customers.
Our model facilitates the ability for the customer to come in and have a look at the data centre, have a look at the equipment if required, and see where it all sits, and try to demystify it a little bit.
We say, ‘This is where it sits, this is the type of infrastructure it’s sitting behind, this is how it works’, and then try and demystify it a little bit. It’s a different approach, but it does address a lot of the concerns.
CRN Let’s talk about how resellers make the transition to the business model for cloud. What are some of the challenges you’ve all encountered?
Brian Pereira For traditional technology type-businesses like ours, it’s been quite a drastic transformation, because we’re used to selling the cloud service so to speak, and the hardware and all the software that goes along with it. You have a long tail of services that you sell on top of that to make everything work together. Moving to a true definition of cloud services, customers don’t really care what environment it sits on. What they want is a service level, secure environment, fast throughput and the satisfaction that their data is going to be safe.
CRN Can you talk us through how you achieve that or plan to achieve profitability with this new model?
Brian Pereira The new model is annuity-based. Where we’ve traditionally been used to having large chunky projects that are profitable while they’re running, it’s now about servicing clients to make sure they stay because they can turn off your service when they don’t need it.
CRN Is the rise of cloud services affecting the way suppliers can differentiate the offer to customers?
Andrew Sjoquist Part of the issue now is the definition of quality. Brand names such as HP and Cisco previously had a relatively easy sell. Seeing now that whole definition of resource pooling coming into the mix, how do you actually identify quality solutions over solutions that potentially are on a non-quality platform?
Coming back to service levels, every service provider aims to deliver 100 percent of the time. But the reality with service levels, what they actually mean is not the length of the outages, but the number of outages. That generally depends on the quality of the hardware and other underlying aspects of the solution. So I think there has to be a change in approach to service levels; how they’re constructed and how they’re viewed by customers. But also some form of independent qualification, certification in the market around cloud services to define what is a quality and premium cloud service and what is perhaps cheaper or lower quality.
The scale between zero and 10 from a quality standpoint needs some checking.
CRN Risk and service levels, do we all think these are the two key factors customers assess before moving to the cloud?
Peter Doubaras We are having trouble convincing customers to go to cloud because it’s still the unknown for most of them. From there security is a big issue and so then we have all the privacy issues. It’s a very hard sell at this stage. As for service levels, where do you start and how do we differentiate ourselves from everybody else? We’re all going to be the same.
Andrew Tucker The question of security is an interesting one. If you look at the on-premise stuff, it’s probably the most insecure. Perhaps the way to make customers happy is to let them feel and touch it. SLAs are evolving and becoming a lot more mature. Cloud is definitely becoming a lot easier to sell.
If a customer understands it, and can feel and touch it, and you can actually let them play with it, it tends to be a great starting point. We’ve experienced growth of between 11 percent month-on-month in the past two years.
CRN It seems that the perception problems are potentially bigger than any real challenges – is that fair to say?
Andrew Sjoquist The reality is now we’re seeing reports out of the NSA [National Security Agency] that it can now decrypt and get into any system that you want.
There’s the physical fortress and virtual fortress. But I think that needs to be independently verified rather than just saying it, and printing it on brochures and websites. They should be actually tested on some regular basis by some independent authority, to be able to rank one against the other.
Brian Pereira If you look at cyber security there’s a whole bunch of industrial security and if you look at cyber-attacks from other countries from outside of Australia into Australia, they’ve grown tenfold in the past six months.
Talk to the security guys in Canberra and they will tell you we’ve been particularly singled out by China for attacks – across government and business. They’re looking for trade secrets, intellectual property. That is one aspect of security you need to protect.
The second aspect of security is the government-to-government interchange of data, but if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. The first security protection is critical, because there are elements outside of the country who will look to steal your data, who will look to steal your technology, your intellectual property, and that’s the main security protection I think that people need to focus on – as opposed to worrying about whether the US has access to my passport number.
Andrew Sjoquist Theft is one thing, but there’s also the matter of denial of service. It’s probably an even bigger issue to be honest rather than actually concealing something. It’s actually stopping something from working.
Jason Gomersall The other thing is you find the outsource partner gets marked so much harder than the internal party. The first year they outsource to a managed network and there’s half-an-hour of downtime, there’s outrage, notwithstanding the fact that there were 42 hours of downtime the year before doing it themselves.
As outsource partners we have to perform much better because we’re the ones who end up in the paper. When it happens internally they can deal with that and keep a lid on it.
So there will continue to be debate around service levels and whether outsourcing to the cloud is giving better outsourcing or not.
CRN Earlier you were alluding to the fact there is this fear from the IT department that they’re losing their jobs the more that goes to the cloud. And potentially the guys who are grading you are the same guys who’ve also got the most to lose from the cloud. How do you deal with that challenge?
Jason Gomersall Whether they’re moving their racks from their computer room into a co-location facility five or 10 years ago, there was the same sort of resistance back then. They try and convince the C-level that they can run a computer room better than someone can run a mega data centre – running their own VPN centre versus a fully managed private IP network.
These arguments continue and whether they’re worried about their jobs or whether they are genuinely passionate about what they do and do genuinely feel that they can do a better job, the numbers don’t lie.
The other key point is if you took a cross-section of 10 companies, together they probably have enough IT resources to run 100 companies. Now we’re moving to a model of ‘why are we doing that collectively? If we pool to the cloud we’ll get IT more cost-effectively and an overall higher level of service.’
That’s the concept of cloud. It’s a bit like the electricity network. People once generated their own power. Then a grid came along and did it more cost effectively.
It’s an easy thing to create fear, uncertainty and doubt – to say ‘what about this’ or ‘what about that’. But stripping all that back, the cloud is the way to go. It is happening and everyone is progressing.
Brian Pereira I think the role of the CIO is either disappearing or it is changing. We find in the cloud sale, about 60 percent of our sales don’t happen at a technology level. They happen at a business unit head level: head of sales; head of finance. It’s no longer a CIO decision where they put the requests through and someone spends eight months assessing it all.
CRN Do you see yourself as less of an IT solutions provider and more of a business consultancy provider?
Brian Pereira Yes. Now we’re having conversations around, OK how can we make your procurement today process a lot more fun and more efficient. How can we actually deliver productivity; productivity to any device, anywhere in a dependable fashion.
CRN How challenging are you finding the billing side?
Brian Pereira It’s like billing for telecommunications services. You have to have enough sophistication to actually bill for usage. Successful cloud providers will have that ability to say, ‘If we use that service for an hour, we can measure when you’ve turned it on and when you’ve turned it off and how much you use.’ Just like an electricity generator or a mobile phone provider.
CRN This brings us back to the issue of standards in a way.
Nick Beaugeard ISO 20000 is a common language for IT, which in a way is missing from cloud. In the cloud you need standards to guide how you resource. How do we do SLAs and how do we bill? What’s fascinating is that those frameworks traditionally would pervade the top-of-the-town enterprises; very large banks, mining companies, the fortune 500s. Now, we as providers are needing to adopt all of that maturity to deliver good, high availability and well-built clouds for our customers.
Going back to the view here that it’s been hard to get customers on board, the other fascinating thing I’ve seen with the cloud is there’s almost no change. Once people move they’re not moving off these platforms. They’re loving it and they’re staying with it.
From a reseller’s perspective, that should give you some form of relief that there is not just this different financial model. The customers stick with you – and they stick with you for an ultra-long period, because these services work really well, compared to what they used to use.
CRN The traditional reseller world didn’t see much churn either did it? There had to be something pretty catastrophic to get kicked out.
Nick Beaugeard It depends on the size of the account. If you’ve got a good relationship with a large account, you will find that. In the SMB space they don’t tend to be very loyal. But we’ve found that space has probably been the most loyal when we’ve gone to cloud. The client we did our very first cloud deployment for; it almost went horribly wrong. But they’re still a client now.
Brian Pereira Look at the valuations for companies like ours in traditional IT versus what’s happening with cloud providers. You’re getting somewhere between four and six-times earnings as valuations for medium sized traditional IT companies today. The cloud players that are getting sold and are emerging in the US are getting somewhere between 11 and 25 times multiples. That’s because of that long tail of revenue.
Nathan Wegener Going back to the earlier discussion about how to make the switch business model-wise, my company is a publicly traded US software company. Quarter by quarter, live or die, you’ve got to make a software sale. We entered the cloud market from the perspective of the technology and its complicated for our customers. They are hospitals and IT is not fundamentally their strength. There has got to be a good relationship between providing a service that’s better than they can do internally and that’s going to make them a happier client. It’s one of the most successful parts of our business. About 80 percent of our US client base is managed by us, rather than trying to do it themselves.
CRN Do you worry when you read in the media about a cloud services breach that customers are then going to get anxious about what you’re providing? Once anyone goes down, does it hurt all of you?
Nathan Wegener Until it happens to you, you can claim that you’re different. The weak link is what’s happening on the client’s site. Their internal policies are much weaker and prone to failure than the defence systems we have set up.
Jason Gomersall The more sophisticated clients know the issues and just want you to be on top of things. They don’t expect that you’ve got a perfect data centre. That’s why you have redundancies. The PCs won’t work and you’ll have redundancy to cover it, and you’ll be able to recover quickly.
With the cloud or any outsource service, it will be marked a lot harder, but I think we will do a much better job. Whether there’s a tipping point – I think Australia is not quite at a sophisticated point and the fear will still pull the uptake back a bit. This could happen, that could happen. Once you’re over the tipping point they go, ‘Yes that could happen, but it’s proven.’
I liken it to private IP networks. That’s where we started 10 or 15 years ago. It had to be related to a physical frame relay network from Telstra; that was the only way to do it. Private IP wasn’t as secure. We are way past that and that took a good five or more years to make the transition.
Now there’s no question that private IP is every bit as secure and effective and more cost effective than that secure frame network. That’s one example of many. Maybe 2014 is that year where we’ll get that tipping point; customers understanding while the cloud is not perfect, it’s definitely better.
CRN Ian, what are some of the conversations you’re having with your customers about cloud? Are you finding that they’re amenable or still quite resistant?
Ian Kinsella Totally amenable. I’m finding at the moment that perception is still a big thing among clients, particularly at the SMB level. Certainly at the corporate level there are CIOs who’ve got their heads around this. They’re taking on a strategic role where they can manage an external centre relationship and equipment, but at the SMB level, unfortunately the marketing of cloud has over-simplified the story. That has a downside; customers expect that everything just happens.
CRN Does that actually concern you as a business owner, given that Nick claims there’s hardly any churn anyway?
Ian Kinsella The churn is reduced, yes, because the natural life cycle in the traditional capital expenditure sees your whole relationship put under the torch every three to four years. That’s not happening in the hosting space, because as long as the application is running seamlessly, and as long as the demarcation between your role as the cloud provider or your role as the IT management partner is adequately defined, most of those issues tend to go away.
CRN So is your business more predictable now?
Ian Kinsella It’s certainly more predictable and the fact that we can control the rate of progress of our technical capacity is a godsend. But there is still a lot of business out there that think in terms of the old way. We’re in a transitory model insofar as we made investments into providing data centre infrastructure to our clients five or six years ago.
The change in the way our consulting relationships are structured is we’re less on premise space now naturally, but we’re still very much strategic partners. We’re infrastructure management partners, and the fact that we’re managing infrastructure in a data centre that we’ve constructed is irrelevant to the client. What is important to us of course is we maintain that advisory role and that management role.
CRN Generally speaking, how disruptive has the cloud been to date for all of your businesses?
Nick Beaugeard We built the business to take advantage of the opportunity with the cloud. I built what I thought was a new channel. Every customer I have, we won off a traditional channel player. So I think the cloud is going to have massive disruption. I see there’s a bunch of organisations from people around this table going, ‘Yes I see the opportunity, we’re going to transform our business and make it happen.’
There are another thousand of them going, ‘Maybe not yet, maybe this isn’t the time for us, maybe we won’t change our business’ and I’ve been saying this for a few years.
But they’re starting to see it’s impacting their traditional businesses. Companies talk to each other and say, ‘This cloud thing’s great’ and we see that ripple effect.
CRN Some traditional IT companies will struggle to make the shift. What are the challenges that make it more difficult? Is it the revenues, the cultural mindset, the customer make-up... ?
Andrew Tucker Some companies we see have either not got enough annuity income in their traditional base. It’s mainly those who aren’t so financially strong that tend to hang off a little bit before they make that transition. The other issue is that people are very protective of their staff. When they’re looking to enter the cloud, many ask themselves: ‘What do we do with these engineers?’
On billing, that’s what we spent a lot of money on, because we’ve seen a lot of companies fail with their inability to bill. We built a comprehensive billing engine that can actually bill on behalf of the client. It is a very important part of how we went about building the business; make sure that partners could bill. I think that is going to actually catch a lot of companies out.
Peter Doubaras Years ago when everyone started outsourcing, we had the same concerns. Customers had the same concerns; IT departments had the same concerns that they were going to lose control. This is just another process of that.
On the matter of keeping your customers, I think it will get to the point where once it’s proven and once there is a lot of competition out there, people will start shopping around and moving. At the moment, yes, you’re keeping your customers for a few years. It might not be the stage for them to move yet, because there’s not a lot of competition out there, but given another five to 10 years, that’s when all that will change.
Brian Pereira On the point around billing and the utility model, one of the big differences between cloud and a utility as such is that a utility by definition, ie electricity or water, is very top end of line. So kilowatt and electricity comes down the line at 240 volts and that’s it. The difference in cloud is that there’s a way for us to value add that with the services, and different types of clouds too. You don’t get different types of electricity. It’s either 240 volts or it doesn’t work. That’s where people try and take it down to the lowest common denominator, but there’s got to be a point in time where that’s got to stop, otherwise we will end up with everyone being the same. That’s why billing is very important, but from a comparative point of view, there’s always going to be an element to differentiate the offerings in the market.
CRN Is everyone else finding that Australian customers want a person they can call?
Ian Kinsella Absolutely. Everyone wants to be able to speak to a human, regardless of how automated they want their lives. In our case, that became a shift from having field technicians constantly calling on sites to having a full helpdesk on hand to answer questions at any time. That again gives you that more consistent model that you can plan on.
CRN Is it accurate to say the high-touch approach is where the cloud market is heading?
Ian Kinsella We use that approach to our data centre product. We’re not a cloud provider, of course, but I think that philosophy is what the market is looking for. Plus, before you can sell them anything, including cloud, I think you’ve got to educate them. A lot of companies have heard about the cloud and they know what to do with it, but they need help to make that transition. The more sophisticated customers out there know how to go and buy Amazon Web Services (AWS). They’re doing it in the US and they know how to go about it, but there’s a massive segment out there that needs someone to show them the way.
CRN Further to the discussion of changing business models, are people also finding that the cloud is affecting changes in terms of the rules of engagement?
Nick Beaugeard I think there’s a long way to go until everyone finds their feet. With Amazon customers, they know where they stand, they know the product [AWS] and what it is. And you buy it like you would a Model T Ford. There’s a customer base out there that knows what it does and knows how to get onto that, but I think most customers still need to find their way onto the cloud.
There are lots of opportunities, especially in servicing niche requirements including around verticals. The AWS-type service is very vanilla.
Brian Pereira It’s also heavily marketed. If you look at AWS and their offerings, you have to separate the marketing hype from what they can actually deliver in the country. So a lot of it is very American-based and is ruled throughout the globe in a very vanilla fashion.
It’s always good for the uneducated or unaware as a buyer to dig and look under the bonnet and make sure that what you’re actually seeing in a PowerPoint presentation or a website is actually what you get.
Nick Beaugeard I remember having a very similar discussion with a colleague back in the early ’90s when we first saw Windows NT come from Microsoft. We were petrified that customers would pick up that installation wizard to be able to install the server themselves.
It’s the same discussion. We are sitting here going, ‘Sophisticated customers can set up Amazon themselves.’ Well, they really can’t, and the opportunity for the channel is the same or greater than it ever was. You can deliver more to more people than you ever could before so maybe that’s fear more than anything else. We get a bunch of customers who try to do it themselves and have stuffed it up – that hasn’t changed at all.
Jason Gomersall Yes, there’s a whole new segment of customers who facilitate people getting onto cloud. They don’t even buy the cloud, they just facilitate companies getting onto the cloud, and that’s a whole segment itself. There’s now a dozen companies that do that in Australia.
Andrew Tucker I think it’s actually going to get to the point where the tree’s going to be shaken and you’re not going to have that plethora of companies. Then you are going to have those who’ve done their homework, done their groundwork and come through the top. Every year the technology has done that, so it’s a wait and see game.
Peter Doubaras It’s being able to stabilise and show what a true cloud is, versus what the other options are. I agree with you but it’s coming up with that true cloud, which is in itself evolving.
CRN We started on the subject of definitions, but do we still agree that there’s a lot of cloud-washing going on out there? And what impact is that having on the end user?
Ian Kinsella I was dealing with a client just recently who was looking at completing an infrastructure upgrade from very old equipment and wasn’t in the technology space at all. Their perception of what cloud offers is almost based on an Apple advertisement.
Right throughout that meeting, references to hosted applications constantly were coined as ‘going to the iCloud’ and so her expectation of what their business would look like, once she’d made this transition, is very different to what we were trying to describe from a technical point of view, and that’s still a burden. The ‘cloud wash’ is completely confusing people unfortunately.
Brian Pereira You could almost look at one parameter of Nick’s definition, and that’s being able to use it on demand, so you pay for what you use and you don’t pay for what you don’t use. Now if you can actually go through all the so-called cloud providers and ask the question, ‘Can I ramp down as quickly as I can ramp up?’ You can ramp up as much as you like, but you need an annual date to actually ramp down, and that’s going to be a pretty hard conversation. So I think if you can’t go both ways, then you’re not a true cloud provider.
CRN A little-discussed sidebar of this industry is that the cloud actually makes it a lot easier for people to get together and say, ‘We provide IT services through the cloud.’ Is this possibly opening the door for more and more cowboys?
Brian Pereira That’s the worry, if you look at business statistics in Australia there’s a high number – I think 2.1 million – of new businesses every year that start-up and 50 percent of them fail before their third year, and another 40 percent will close before their fourth year.
This commoditisation of IT services actually means that you don’t need a hell of a lot of capital to be able to set up a business for example, because you can do it out of your home now with a PC sitting on your desk and you could go out to the market and offer cloud services. You could aggregate a whole different set of providers who don’t know how to sell and be the sales arm of that. Companies who have now trusted that service trusted the fact that you’ve sold them something are going to be left in the lurch. I think there’s a bit more hindsight and discovery and care needs to be done from the buyer’s side to actually evaluate the organisation standing behind and maybe twice removed. So who’s your data centre provider? Who’s your software provider? And if you’re aggregating, ‘Who do I have the contract with?’
CRN Back to your point Jason that so many companies don’t know how to get onto the cloud. Presumably rich pickings for less scrupulous operators?
Jason Gomersall There’s two sides of this. There are going to be some players emerge over the next few years that we’ve never heard of. Smart young guys, working out of a serviced office that will go and be great enterprises. But the flip side will be a bunch of cowboys who go out, connect with a customer and convince the customer they know what they’re doing when they don’t – the pretty brochures and great sales pitch and all that sort of stuff, and sign business and do a really poor job of it. You liken that to other technologies that have emerged over the past 10 or 15 years.
I think we might also see all these mining companies that become cloud that were dotcom companies and reinvented themselves as listed mining companies.
We’re going to see all that sort of stuff and if we redefine our company to this, our multiple goes from five to six to 11 to 15 or whatever.
CRN One thing you hear about the cloud is it’s so easy for the end user to spin something up for themselves. One of the big banks recently revealed it had 80 instances of Salesforce spun up throughout the organisation, all of them done outside of IT. Is a lot of business being done outside the end user’s authorised procurement channel?
Ian Kinsella I think that’s another example of where managed services come into play, particularly in larger organisations where there are so many avenues for disparate applications without proper co-ordination. That’s where the CIO’s role will be just 30 percent about coordinating technology in the business with a greater emphasis on managing relationships.
CRN As salespeople how do you change your approach to the customer, when suddenly it’s a very different kind of customer?
Nick Beaugeard The IT department is actually our biggest competitor and so we are selling to the business the whole way through. The change we made when we built the company was go and sell to anybody except IT and then just let them know. That is very different obviously.
CRN So you are getting the sense that the traditional CIO is dead?
Nick Beaugeard There are some CIOs out there who are brilliant and really forward thinking and get the whole cloud thing. They’ve spent a lot of their time managing political infighting in their own organisations.
CRN Yes, but surely there must be some CIOs out there that will pause before signing on with even the most efficient cloud serving provider, because they’re essentially making their role redundant right?
Ian Kinsella I don’t think so. A clever CIO will understand they pull the strings, they control the relationship and in cases where the role of CIO is actually a joint role within the board of directors – and so that same individual has a pretty clear under-standing of the legal framework they’re entering into – they’re in complete control. But there are those who aren’t so confident about their role within the organisation, they’re the ones who’ll be paranoid.
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