Everyone loves a good story and Alan Perkins, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific for Rackspace, has a great one to tell. A heavyweight of the technology world, we were lucky enough to host him at our latest Techdrop session at the end of August 2013. His tale was about how he arrived at cloud computing at Rackspace.
Not just a case of being in the right place at the right time, Alan’s a bit of a visionary. About ten years ago, he saw how technology was evolving and identified opportunities to push technical boundaries. At the time he was working at a company called Altium. While working with programmes like Salesforce, he started viewing them as platforms rather than programmes. Rather than the programme being the end point, the platform could instead be the starting point and be built on, tailoring it to the individual needs of its users. It could then be extended further, making it “talk” to the likes of Google, Marketo or Interact. Not such revolutionary ideas now; they were then.
Alan has even coined his own term for this sort of thinking or approach: “elastic innovation.” He draws a parallel with the Industrial Revolution and the invention of electricity. It was not until people began to see the knock-on effects and innovations of electricity that they began to truly appreciate its revolutionary nature. These effects included the replacement of coal in powering factories, machinery and transportation; the replacement of manpower and the subsequent cleaning up of an environment that had been made filthy by coal.
Alan Perkins suggests that we are only now scratching the surface of the elastic innovations of cloud computing. He provided an example in document collaboration. What we think of as document collaboration (one originator, a series of edits going back and forth and often losing track of the original document) doesn’t even touch the sides. True document collaboration comes from using tools like Google Docs and editing live, seeing what others are doing in real-time. The end result is time-saving with fast production of documents, valuing content first and presentation later.
Lastly, just in case you’re interested, Rackspace provides some of the computing power behind the Large Hadron Collider. Alan Perkins was named by The Australian as one of the Top 20 people to watch in technology 2012, and in 2009 was a finalist for the IDC Asia Pacific CIO of the Year Award. In the same year he won an Enterprise Innovation Award for Cloud innovation from IDC.
Another great Techdrop session. Thanks Alan for sharing your story. Get in touch if you want to come along to our next Techdrop session.
Nick Langstone
At ClearPoint we believe that innovation can occur anywhere and anytime. Discussion and debate between peers from different industries is a good stimulus for creativity and innovation. That’s why we initiate the Techdrop series. Get in touch for more details or stay tuned to our blog for more fresh thinking.
Alan Perkins
(first published 17 Sept 2013)