CloudBeat 2013: How Stanford is ‘going cloud’

One of the world’s top universities, Stanford, is the latest to join the roster of our CloudBeat 2013 event next month.

Stanford, located at the heart of Silicon Valley, is more advanced than most universities when it comes to embracing cloud technology. We told the story last May about how its world-class hospital is experimenting with big data and other cloud projects.

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At CloudBeat, on Sept. 9-10 in San Francisco, we’ve invited Katie Talamantez, finance director of the Stanford division that oversees buildings, grounds, vehicles, and power generation, to talk about how her organization is moving operations to the cloud too. She manages a budget in excess of $250M to keep everything running smoothly.

Until recently, Talamantez and her team relied on Excel spreadsheets for tracking areas of the division’s budget. But she found this introduced too many opportunities for errors and duplication and grew concerned after almost committing multimillion-dollar mistakes. Trading Excel spreadsheets between inboxes also hampered financial visibility between departments.

Talamantez will share the significant benefits she’s seeing as she moves her budget financing operations to a single SaaS solution from Adaptive Planning.

Talamantez tried some other solutions, including Oracle’s products, would would basically have been free given Stanford’s existing Oracle Financials contract. However, she says, she simply couldn’t mould those other products to the workflow she wanted. The cloud product from Adaptive allows employees to pick up work for a colleague when they are off or busy (which Excel didn’t permit). Stanford is also at an early stage of increasing the automated flow of data to and from other campus systems.

Come listen to how Stanford and other major organizations are moving their most important operations to the cloud. At the event, we’re focusing exclusively on the most compelling cases of cloud adoption; we’re featuring significant companies including PayPal, Netflix, General Electric, and more.

Full CloudBeat 2013 details are here, and make sure to register today! We’re filling up.

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2013: IBM jStart as Gold Sponsor; ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsor; and CareCloud, Norwest Venture Partners, and Plex Systems as Event Sponsors.