Cloud Apps Streamline Data and Add Value
May 22, 2012
By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor
The 80’s and early 90's were all about building rich desktop applications, the last 15 years have been about building Web applications, and now, it’s all about cloud applications.
Cloud applications are a hybrid between traditional desktop applications and traditional Web applications. Like desktop apps, cloud apps offer a rich user experience, immediate response to user actions, and offline mode. Like Web apps, cloud applications do not need to be installed on a computer and can be updated at any time simply by uploading a new version to your Web server. They also store their data in the cloud, offsite under your control.
Working with cloud apps, are "cloud platforms", which process language code on behalf of clients and deliver results to them through the network. The reason cloud platforms are growing in importance is because they are fertile ecosystems for creating, distributing and selling functionality - apps that customers install and that have explicit functions.
Cloud app provider, Google (News - Alert) Apps, allows your work to be saved automatically in the cloud with access to your e-mail, calendar, documents, and sites, while being able to work securely, no matter where you are in the world and what device you're on. Google Apps helps streamline everyday tasks like invoicing, budgeting, scheduling and more. By removing these time-consuming bottlenecks, Apps frees you up to spend more time on the work that really matters. Google Apps lets you share and edit files like docs, spreadsheets, presentations and more in real time. Google Apps also includes security features designed to keep your data safe, secure and in your control.
Davide Petramala, EVP sales & business development of Esnatech, provider of Unified Communications (UC) cloud solutions such as Google Apps, recently sat down with TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani at Interop 2012 to discuss the company’s voice apps and collaboration with Google.
Esnatech simplifies modern communications with its award-winning technology with easy access to all of your communications from any device or business application. Esnatech integrates messaging, mobility and presence into a single, intuitive system. It builds it all into your existing office system such as, Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS/365 and Exchange, Zimbra (News - Alert), Lotus Notes and other on-premise and cloud-based business solutions.
“Applications around voice and the way you process voice have business appeal across the board so we started building apps that every day businesses could use,” said Petramala. “A lot of our apps said we don’t care what kind of infrastructure you have, just layer the apps on and we can improve your business process.”
Several years ago, Esnatech took its application suite and started going directly to resellers. “We have an application suite that could go to any customer and say, if you are buying new equipment this will add value,” he said. “If you are not buying new equipment, we can improve your whole process whether it is integrating voice into business applications, improving a business process. You can pick the app you want, layer it on and we can add value.”
What drove people to invest in Esnatech’s technology was the fact that it integrated core voice features like dialing, presence, mobility features natively into business applications. This idea led the company into the current initiative of building its brand around the cloud because Esnatech sees the cloud as the next environment around business applications.
“What we saw was this trend: Data was moving to the cloud,” Petramala said. “In fact, what we have noticed in the last two to three years is e-mail has become the driver for UC. Companies can’t afford to just maintain and manage something so tactical of an investment. So, we took our application platform and we build it about four years ago to integrate natively into apps.”
Esnatech identified Google about four years ago as a major player in the enterprise space because they own 60-70 percent of the cloud-based e-mail seats in the enterprise. Esnatech then observed the idea that e-mail was a natural shift to the cloud.
The company soon became part of the Google ecosystem and the Google enterprise group started promoting Esnatech as their UC partner. Google now had a partner that could layer in and integrate that public cloud app onto that on-premise infrastructure, which was very important for them because customers that were going to the cloud many of them already had unified messaging and click-to-dial and it was a driver.
“We had a lot of success and built a great partnership with Google. We now have this whole new ecosystem of Google Apps resellers whose entire focus is collaboration and layering Esnatech as that voice integration piece,” he explained.
At the end of the day, Petramala suggested, when you have one managed service vs. another, you don’t want it to be determined by price. The way to differentiate your offering is how you can integrate that service into different business applications in order to drive adoption and maximizing utilization.
With Esnatech, when people move to the cloud they can retain and gain more functionality with less software. Esnatech is about building integration so that silos can communicate together as one platform.
Petramala said, “By embedding these services in these different applications, you are getting true ubiquity.”
Edited by Brooke Neuman