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VB Webinar

What Yelp and the U.S. Air Force can teach SMBs about cloud strategies (webinar)

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Join us for this live webinar — Small business thinking big: Enterprise-grade cloud strategies for SMBs — on Wednesday, March 25 at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. 

In a report released last September, Deloitte found that SMBs using cloud technologies to deal with growth challenges are growing 26 percent faster and delivering 21 percent higher gross profits than those who are not.

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They’re also borrowing heavily from the kinds of enterprise-grade cloud solutions available that allow them access to tools and technologies they would never otherwise have the capital or skill-set to implement.

So what can SMBs learn from the big guys — and the tools and strategies they rely on?

In this upcoming webinar, we’ll share how enterprise-grade solutions can be adopted by SMBs to drive bottom-line results, improve responsiveness, and promote innovation.

On hand, we’re thrilled that Sam Eaton, Director of Engineering Operations for Yelp, will be sharing some of the company’s leading practices to meet the demands of 138 million monthly unique visitors — along with Sky Sharma, a CIO at the U.S. Air Force, and Steven Hill, Senior Analyst at Current Analysis.

The turn-on/turn-off access to infinite resources is one of the most attractive benefits of cloud-resources. Contract this to traditional tech purchasing requiring businesses to buy technology with fixed capacity – and needing the internal people resources to manage it.

It’s what enabled Threadless — the online art t-shirt company with upwards of 300,000 customers — to go from crashing their site every time they held a sale to becoming an early adopter of cloud technologies to stay high and dry, and becoming the T-shirt megalith while other early dot coms were going down for days. No question, overcoming scalability is one of the key technology challenges small businesses face as they start to experience growth – something sure to come up in the webinar.

Or consider the 300 percent increase in security attacks on SMBS since 2011. By taking weak cloud connections to the next level, small business can thwart hackers who see the low-hanging fruit of smaller companies who haven’t yet built up more security muscle in the cloud.

Enterprise has also mastered using cloud solutions as sandboxes for innovation in order not to threaten the bread-and-butter operations of their business — something successful SMBs are now adopting.

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What you’ll learn in this webinar:

  • How are enterprises pivoting so quickly to respond to operational goals and drive bottom line results?
  • How can SMBs use cloud functions to serve an ever-impatient customer base?
  • Can SMBs realize the kind of growth and innovation through cloud services that enterprises expect?
  • And more importantly, how do SMB CIOs get their hands on all of those pretty, shiny enterprise toys?

Speakers:

Sam Eaton, Director of Engineering Operations, Yelp Sam is responsible for large scale infrastructure, providing reviews to over 138 million monthly unique visitors. He started his career in Systems Administration back in the early days of consumer internet providers in the UK, has managed large physical and cloud infrastructures for internet companies and major publishers, and has become a strong proponent of the DevOps approach to improving culture in technical organizations.

Sky Sharma, CIO, Air Combat Command, Command Surgeon, U.S. Air Force Sky is a career member of the Air Force Medical Service. He is responsible for all directorate IM/IT operations and oversees IT projects at 14 medical facilities.  He is passionate about using enterprise architecture to make technology decisions viable and flexible — and getting the right information to the right people at the right time, creating and sharing knowledge, and acting upon information in ways that measurably improve performance.

Steven Hill, Senior Analyst, Data Center Solutions, Current Analysis Steven is responsible for covering the emerging technologies that are remapping the traditional data center landscape. These include software and hardware products that are needed to support public and private cloud infrastructures, as well as the underlying virtualization and orchestration technology required to enable process automation and workload management. He also covers the Converged Infrastructure market, with a focus on the latest generations of vendor pre-certified and optimized hardware/software stacks.

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Editor and Analyst, VentureBeat  Wendy is a technology journalist with more than a decade experience in enterprise IT. Most recently, Schuchart was the senior site editor of TechTarget’s CIO Media Group. She has also served as section editor for UBM’s Network Computing and Secure Enterprise. She is a frequent contributor to InformationWeek, Network Computing, Green Data Center, Wikibon and other leading tech publications. She holds a Masters from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

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Register here for free.

This webinar is produced in part by Rackspace.