We just finished a “cloudsourcing” panel at Dreamforce, hosted by Appirio’s CEO, Chris Barbin. On stage were Mark Newhall (COO, Market Force Information) and Dick Escue (CIO of RehabCare).

The key theme was how the cloud can support business transformation. Both Mark and Dick are using the cloud to not just cut costs, but fundamentally change their business. Let’s hear how, in their own words:

Traditional enterprise IT inhibits innovation: “We’ve done 4 acquisitions in the last 4 years. Every time you acquire a company, you acquire a system and a culture. We were in a place where doing something as simple as changing a dashboard took 30 days. We need to destroy our competitors by moving a whole lot faster.”

With the Cloud, IT can enable innovation: “The cloud has changed everything for our IT department. The perception of IT with our business was of a black hole: spend a bunch of money, wait months and months, and maybe nothing would come out. Now people think of IT as an enabler to grow and transform the business. We are changing the way we compete for business by using IT. And the time to value is so great that we’re going to do that on the cloud”

Getting started is easy: “We’d had a good experience with Saleforce SFA—it was the quietest, smoothest implementation I’ve ever been part of. Then we looked at a paper-based process that was causing us to lose business- we weren’t moving fast enough. Our CEO said that this process has to be done in under an hour, and has to be mobile. We had no idea how to make it mobile. I came to Dreamforce, saw what was possible, and told my developers to check it out. By the time I got home, they showed me the app, already running on my iPhone. I was impressed.”

New approaches (and types of partners) are required: “One of the things I like about Appirio’s model is that the first deliverable is a prototype—not powerpoint slides. Its enough of the system so that you can get real feedback from customers and a case to move forward. I love this methodology. And you can do that with these tools, that quickly. Solutions in the cloud really lend themselves to this sort of methodology"

Strategy and Change Management are Key: “There’s no strategic value in me managing a data center. Every FTE in my IT team really matters, I don’t want them to focus on commodity infrastructure. My team sees where this is headed, and many of them are embracing the change. And if you don’t like change—you’re going to like irrelevance even less”