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King of the Data Center

Beyond the careful review of SaaS providers, there is an element of internal evaluation that is required. As SaaS applications increasingly serve a role as core systems of record, building organizational comfort with where and how data is managed becomes a major factor.

Doug Menefee, CIO of Schumacher Group, a national physician practice management company, has many applications in the cloud: Workday HCM, Salesforce CRM, Force.com, Ceridian, NetTime, PeopleSoft, Tangier Web, Google, Eloqua, DocuSign, Conga, EchoSign, and Apttus. But he also has an onsite data center, which includes Cisco, Microsoft SQL Server, GE Healthcare, EMC2, OnBase, and Kofax. In a sense, Menefee rules over just half of his IT infrastructure.

That’s okay with him, but it may not be for other CIOs. It’s Menefee’s view that security concerns can be a cover for another concern: loss of control over one’s data center. “For self-fulfillment, they control everything within their own domain,” Menefee says. The organization is better served, however, when the CIO can focus on developing and supporting business strategy through smart technology deployments.

Menefee says he’s directly involved with strategy, understands the long- and short-term goals of Schumacher Group, and reports directly to the CEO. Workday HCM fits into those goals, he says, as it was the best choice for supporting the 10-year-old company’s rapid growth. Workday is easy and cost-effective to scale and more flexibly adapts to an ever-changing healthcare environment than the onsite applications he considered.

Still, Menefee doesn’t downplay legitimate security concerns. Certain businesses and government organizations may have extraordinarily rigorous requirements regarding data security. That doesn’t mean cloud computing isn’t an option, Menefee says, but those organizations must do the work to determine whether a SaaS provider can meet their specific security needs.

Additional Resources

Brian Sommer of TechVentive

SaaS: Now Serving Large, Complex Enterprises

In this report, Brian Sommer of TechVentive, a leading market-strategy and content firm, outlines the reasons SaaS products are well positioned to grow in large enterprises.

Continuous Innovation Advantage of SaaS

This report defines the next-generation system-of-record, outlining the changes and challenges with current technology and discusses how continuous innovation has now become critical for any “new” system of record.