Marketing Darwinism: I’m very interested in CloudFit’s strategy. Can you tell our readers a bit more about it?

JM: Thanks Paul for your affirmation. CloudFit is in the “Managed Digital Transformation” space. What this means specifically is that Digital Transformation is very much a function of embracing the cloud and that migrating your applications and workloads to the cloud is not a “one and done” exercise. Cloud Migration as a concept has to be understand as both a set of generalizable principles but also as a very individual factor as each business has its own priorities and constraints. Our software and services accelerate this journey and allow customers to “migrate, monitor, and measure” their cloud applications.

Marketing Darwinism: Fascinating. So is this mostly about financial savings (since you mentioned acceleration?)

KW: It’s about operational excellence of which a piece is financial savings, a piece is accountability, and a piece is working in the background so that the organization can grow its core business and innovate versus getting all its energies caught up in the transformation itself. As a CFO I think about my peers and their needs but I also think about the roles of the CIO and CEO as they are charged with technology-enabled futures.

Marketing Darwinism: You two boast 4 decades of collective Microsoft experience and your three other Principals add another 4 decades. Wow! Tell me about that.

JM and KW: Microsoft has played a huge role in our collective learning and imagination. We are humbled to have been part of Microsoft’s journey to the forefront of Enterprise Computing, Cloud Services, and related areas. We are proud of the large scale we helped enable. Microsoft and its amazing people continue to be core partners and vectors for our success. Clearly, the customers are our main focus and at times they run hybrid or non-Microsoft environments. As a software and services company we have to both respect the customers’ needs but also remember where we came from!

Marketing Darwinism: You are a young company but have already done a major acquisition. That’s very ambitious. Am I reading this correctly?

JM: Paul thanks for this question. Yes, our acquisition of Composable Systems cemented both our team but also our ongoing and deep relationships with core customers. We are indeed young but are very hungry to add value and wanted to create a force multiplier early. We welcomed not only the revenue and customer streams but also the team and expertise.

KW: I’d like to add to this too. We all have had big company backgrounds as you know; I’ve also had the pleasure to help build one of the fastest growing technology companies in the Northwest and understand the importance of building the right team and equipping them with the right tools from the get-go. We didn’t start CloudFit to be a lifestyle business but instead of grow quickly as a function of our value-add.

Marketing Darwinism: What do your customers say about you?

JM: Paul, thanks for bringing it back to them. We get very favorable reviews from our customers, many of whom consider us as key partners in their Digital Transformation. In the earlier days, we had a few hiccups and we learned from these. We went in with confident humility and have improved our customer story, interaction, and value-delivery each and every day. We hope to continue to improve. But overall we feel very good about this area of our business.

Marketing Darwinism: What’s the “Garden-variety” case for someone to contact CloudFit?

KW and JM: We believe that any organization that knows they want to transform but needs to understand what the journey is and how to do it in a methodical and accountable way while accelerating time to value is a perfect conversation for us. We want to partner with all organizations that are entering this journey and need to connect their Business needs with this IT process. We believe that Managed Digital Transformation is a very large space and is where the puck is going.

Gartner is predicting that by 2015, 25% of organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and further estimated that 20% of existing chief information officers (CIOs) have already taken on some of the responsibilities of the CDO.

So what does a CDO do?

The role of the CDO in the enterprise has gotten a great deal of attention in recent months. Perhaps because of the impact and influence that the CDO had in the Obama campaign last fall. All the tools of the trade – text analytics, social media analysis, Website personalization, community analytics, computational advertising and online testing, among other things – were used for re-elect the President of the United States.

In this new Age of the Customer (credit to Forrester for naming this one), how well a company uses the readily available information about their customer will determine how successful they are in the marketplace. Which is no small feat since most companies are not “born digital” there is a lot of work to do to get all the people, process and technology to line up.

Adapting to the Age of the Customer requires a new skill set that existing leadership teams don’t necessarily possess. At many modern companies, it’s hard to find anything that is not related to technology in some way.

Moreover, marketing has become so deeply entwined with technology. But this didn’t happen to us overnight; it’s been sneaking up on us for a while. But because technology had been so tangential to marketing management for most of our history, the organizational structure of marketing has been slow to adjust to this new technology-centric reality. But we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. To fully reap the benefits marketing must officially take ownership of its technology platforms and strategies.

I also like to think the traditional path that the CMO has taken to get into the C Suite is changing. Typically the modern day CMO takes Marketing 101 in college, gets a Masters in Marketing, works for a major brand like P&G as an entry level marketer, becomes a brand manager then rises up to eventually become the CMO. Well today’s marketers are growing up digital – they create aps, they place Facebook ads, they run some mobile ads and design augmented reality games – all before lunch! Its no wonder why the idea of a CDO has emerged – because it didn’t make sense for many organizations five years ago, it’s hard to imagine that major companies won’t be operating without one in the very near future.

So how are you preparing for this new reality? 

In this new era, business models cannot be limited to what legacy IT is able to support. Instead, all business systems, including monetization platforms, must adapt to deliver the experiences customers want.

Like it or not, what Andrew McAfee predicted in 2006 in his book, Enterprise 2.0, is here, it’s happening and whether we call it “enterprise social,” or “social business” or just the biggest communications revolution since the printing press, it’s changing the way we do business in a fundamental fashion.

So I suggest the best way to prepare for this is to join me in attending the The Social-Shake-Up Conference. This is not your ordinary conference about social media. Nor is it a conference about advertising or marketing technologies. It’s meant to prepare you for changes that are occurring and give you what you need to succeed in this new era. The conference is a jam-packed two-and-a-half days from September 15-17 in Atlanta with 5 tracks ranging from Big Data, Mobile, Social Organization, Customer and Community as well as Content. I hope to see you there!