This week we are very excited to speak with Narinder Singh, the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Appirio. Narinder has been featured in the Huffington Post, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. We chat with him about leveraging the cloud, strategic direction of the platform, and the changing role of the CIO. Plus Narinder shares with us his- one thing- that makes him successful. You can follow Narinder on  twitter at @singhns and read his blog at narindersingh.com

For Reference here are the articles mentioned in the podcast-

- Why the CIO Must Give Up Something for the Greater Good

- (Tweet): Education, media or your choice

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Announcer: Welcome to the ButtonClick Admin Podcast, a show for Salesforce Admins looking to solve problems in the Cloud. With your hosts, Salesforce MVPs, Mike Gerholdt and Jared Miller. Are you ready to solve some problems, learn helpful tips, and have a few laughs along the way? We are. So, let’s get clicking!

Mike: Welcome to the ButtonClick Admin Podcast. I’m your host, Mike Gerholdt. This week, we are talking Cloud and the future of Cloud with our super-smart guest, Narinder Singh from Appirio. As always, I am joined with my co-host, the one and only Jared Miller. Jared, how are you doing?

Jared: Doing well, really excited.

Mike: Yeah. I am happy to have our guest on today, and with that, I am going to introduce him because I want to hear him talk more than me.

Jared: Absolutely. Let’s not waste time.

Mike: So, with us today, we have Narinder Singh from Appirio. Narinder is the Chief Strategy Officer. He is responsible for overseeing the company’s strategy and marketing. He is also responsible for the creation/evolution of CloudSpokes, Appirio’s innovative crowd- sourcing community for Cloud development. Narinder has written articles for Huffington Post, and been on Fox News and CNN, and I found all that just before looking at your LinkedIn profile, so welcome to the “ButtonClick Admin Podcast,” Narinder.

Narinder: Thanks for having me, Mike and Jared.

Mike: So, we’ll get started off for those people who are not familiar with Appirio and CloudSpokes, can you tell us a little bit about that, and kind of what your role is at Appirio?

Narinder: Sure. I am actually… Thanks for having me on, again. I am excited to be here. It reminds me of, like, my favorite ESPN podcast, so that’s the flair that I’m going to go for. Let me start with a couple of things about Appirio. So, we’ve been around for about six and a half years. We started the company with this exclusive focus of helping organizations use the Cloud, and now that’s extended to Cloud and social and mobile, to disrupt the way they did things to accelerate their adoption of these technologies because we felt like they would disrupt the way business had been done.

So, we started that off by really partnering with the leaders – or future leaders at the time – in Cloud computing companies, like Salesforce.com, Google, Workday, Amazon, and helping large enterprises really start to think about how they could use those technologies and technologies like them to disrupt the way they did business, whether it was their sales function, marketing, HR, or their entire business model, and so that’s been the focus of the company since the beginning. We have delivered these services through some unique mechanisms.

We said, “Look, one of the things that’s interesting is that you can’t assume that the old guard of Siebel will be disrupted by Salesforce, and Peoplesoft will be disrupted by Workday, and Microsoft will be disrupted by Google. Think that the services around those companies will be delivered in exactly the same way. That doesn’t make sense, to us, at least.” So, we said we were going to try to do something that had been very hard, which is disrupt the services industry, which had, for the last 25 years, seen no major innovation, except maybe offshore.

So, we said how would we do that, and we decided that we would really invest in technology, because one of the great parts about the Cloud is that it was the same. You know, when I was at webMethods, we made hundreds of millions of dollars integrating SAP to SAP and Oracle to Oracle, because every version was different. With the Cloud, we get that one baseline, and so that was really powerful for us in how we could use technology to turn service into IP.

The second part, which you mentioned at the beginning, was we said one of the great things is any developer anywhere in the world in 30 seconds or less, can get access to a Cloud system that’s just as powerful as what the largest enterprises in the world use. That’s pretty profound, and for us, that’s what led to CloudSpokes, this notion of crowd sourcing, development for the Cloud.

Because for the first time there was zero friction in a developer being able to participate in your project without knowing anything about your company or having access to your systems. They could really kind of be innovative. So that’s really what Appirio has tried to do the last six-plus years.

Mike: So, you know, I work for an education company. We do the college test prep. That’s my day job. My night job is ButtonClick. In terms of evolution and reading through your article on Huffington Post, did the Cloud grow up too fast? I mean, what can education do to kind of get people out of school and essentially be up and running to work in the Cloud?

Narinder: Mike, you cut out on me just a bit, but I think I got the gist of the question. There is a pretty profound set of change that is going on industry-wide. I put a post out on Twitter a few days ago, you know, I threw out two. I said what’s going to be more disrupted in the next 10 years. Media, health care, education, or other. And there was a lot of conversation around that, because I think what we recognize is that these industries are going to completely reshape themselves the next 10 years, and that’s because of technology.

What we don’t as often recognize is that the technology industry itself is being reshaped and it is being disrupted, and so when you think about the Cloud and what’s happening, I think a big difference will be that, you know, Mark Benyas says a lot of times the world doesn’t change as much as you think in one year, and more than you think in 10, and I believe the technology industry itself is going through that pretty catastrophic disruption which will leave, you know, we’ve done this before as an industry.

The industry giants from 20 years ago are no longer around in technology. And I think we are going to see something similar. And how do people get prepared for that is really the gist of the question that you asked. And I would say a couple of things. The first thing is we have to recognize if you sign up for a career in technology, you are signing up for multiple careers.

So, if I were starting my career in technology today, you almost have an advantage because you get to start fresh. But you have to realize that it’s your responsibility to continually start fresh. We will always have, kind of these juxtapositions of generations together. Even today, mainframes are very predominantly used, at the same time, we are doing Node.js and Ruby on Heroku.

So we are always going to have this mixing of generations and how you learn and leap forward is really going to be critical. So things like CloudSpokes, things like Code Academy, these will become critical ways for you to learn, develop, and test your skills, and it really needs to be a continual life-cycle that people take throughout their careers.

Jared: And it sounds like from, with everything that has been changing, I think noticing over the past year, even two years, we have noticed executives starting to get more strategic about their Cloud investment. Have you seen that, too, and what do you think? Do you think it’s the disruption that’s causing the more strategic focus?

Narinder: Yeah. You know, Jared, you stole a little bit of my thunder. It was going to be one of my points before… this kind of transition from functionally cool, because I figure we’re at the end of the year, we always talk about what’s next. Well, one of my big “what’s next” personally, and I think industry wise is the Cloud, and to a lesser extent, mobile and social have earned their stripes this year. Right?

So they went through and people legitimately, nobody is going to go to a V.C. and try to pitch, “Hey, I’m building this new company with on-premise technology.” That just doesn’t happen now. People have understood and in some cases, the companies are trying to figure out how they use these things, but there are a lot of companies who have used them successfully and seen a material difference between what they used to do, and what they were able to do in HR, sales, finance, customer support, whatever, because of a Cloud solution.

So now, what that means is that technology is a pretty interesting opportunity. People have said, “Oh, technology projects don’t have to take three years. They actually can help my business. So now what?” So now, there is the opportunity if the technology side of the organization or the visionary business side of the organization rises to the challenge, to say we actually do want to do something more disruptive.

We want to use Cloud technology to actually impact on our business model, how we get customers, how we keep them as a part of our business, not simply how we service them or how we manage our sales team. So I think it’s a pretty pivotal year for what’s been early adopters who have already kind of proven to themselves the delta in what the capability is, and so they believe. It’s not hype for them, it’s not marketing hype because they have seen it in their own business.

For those companies, there’s a huge opportunity to say, “Alright, now what?” Now, how can we think about using this to impact the most important parts of our business? Not just the underpinnings/things that support the most important parts of our business. So, to me that’s a big possibility this year, and there are companies we are working at in education that are trying to connect to their student populations differently keep a relationship with people they have served when they were in high school and college for a longer engagement period.

So those things can change their business model. We have seen companies in media, obviously that industry has been completely disrupted, and you are starting to see people really change and say, well, can the Cloud let me get content out there faster, let me move through the cycle of something is paid for, to paid for by sharing, to free faster than we’ve ever seen before, and those are business model disruptive things.

Mike: Yeah. I had a great conversation with a colleague earlier this week, and you can clearly tell the direction Salesforce is going with their marketing Cloud play, but over where the money’s going to be in a business. Traditionally, IT and the CIO took care of the desktops, made sure the servers were working. With Cloud becoming so embedded in companies nowadays, what do you see as the role of the CIO in five or ten years from now?

Narinder: So, I wrote an article for Wall Street Journal recently where I was slightly intentionally provocative, but I think I generally meant it, where I said, “You know what? You should really think about splitting the CIO’s job in two.” Right? And I said what you should do is one half of the job – and most organizations are already divided like this, to some extent – should be around a bundle of things where the metric is to provide those capabilities at the same service level or better at a lower cost, and that’s the objective of that part of IT.

The second part of IT should be something where it’s like, “You know what? Your objective is solely on the business metrics of various drivers of our company, whether it’s customer retention, or sales, or whatever and how technology supports that metric, and so we’re going to look at the end results of our performance and peer-reviewed by your business colleagues, and that’s the sole metrics.” Think about how different those worlds are. Right? To be thinking about both things at once?

I brought this up with a lot of CIOs and said what do you think? And some of them were, of course, hesitant to give away half the empire, so to speak. And, what I’ve said is it may be that in some cases accidentally certain parts of a business roll up to the same person, but you should think about the job in two distinct ways. So it may be that today that it is not uncommon for a CIO to also own facilities. No CIO describes themselves as owning facilities. They just say “I am the senior executive in the company, and I own certain aspects of the business.”

I feel like at most that is how they should feel about the operational side of IT. At most. And more extreme would be you just separate those distinctions because you are seeing things like what you described, where “oh, marketing may have more budget than IT does.” Or you see Gartner this year saying companies are going to have Chief Digital Officers. Those are really getting at the same core notion that it is very hard to be strategic to a company and also be the guy people call when email doesn’t work.

Mike: Right.

Narinder: I think there is going to be a huge bifurcation of CIOs who fit into one of those buckets or the other, and I think in a lot of companies the role will actually get split.

Mike: So, taking a step back out of companies, a bit of pop culture. I am recently addicted to the Bravo show Startup Silicon Valley. I know you have been in startup and definitely in the dot-com boom. Maybe I’m right, or maybe I’m not seeing the pairing. But is the whole startup boom that we are seeing right now reminiscent of the dot-com boom, or does it have more staying power?

Narinder: So, I think it’s different. Like, does it have hype? Sure. It’s funny you mention that show, Startup. There’s a person on that show who we have worked with in some capacities at Appirio in a past life and we were I’d love to come work at Appirio, but I have this show… we were a little scared and we were like, “You know what? We have avoided the soap opera so far, and we’d like to kind of stick to the simple disruption and focus on the message.”

But, it was interesting to see how much controversy that show has caused, because in the Valley a lot of people are a little bit upset with that, and I think it is a little bit taken out of context, because of course it is a Bravo reality show, kind of what do you expect? And I think a little bit of the sensitivity is around getting to, Mike, what you pointed out, which is it reeks of “bubble” when you say there are TV shows being made about it and those kinds of things. Right? And so, I think there is a bubble-like atmosphere to starting companies.

However the big difference is that it is not resulting in a bubble in the public markets, in my opinion, and so it is not something where the world is broke and it is leading to potentially more people starting companies than maybe are ready, and so maybe that the hit rate of those companies will be less than before, but ultimately, I actually don’t look at that as a bad thing because I think more people starting companies that they think are innovative and are going to change the world, that experience is really powerful for people.

I always say look, as long as the culture of the Valley, where you are allowed to fail and then come back and take a job or start another company, is something that I think is really intrinsic to innovation. So, I don’t look at the negative ramifications, maybe people are starting companies a little bit more often than they should, but really, who is to say?

The percentage chances might be a little bit lower because of that, because you have more competition or people aren’t quite ready, but again, I think that experience is very powerful in terms of shaping people, and, you know, certainly as impactful and in some cases more impactful than they would get in other parts, if they went and took a job at a large company. So, I think it is a little bit like let the market settle. It is not an artificial bubble in so much as it is resulting in companies that are worth billions of dollars with zero revenue.

That doesn’t happen as often now, and when it does, it really has more of a once-in-a-generation-type company situation, like an Instagram. So, I look at this as being kind of… it might be hype, but it is not the bubble in the same sense. So, there is the same dissension of over-attention, but it doesn’t have the potential for a negative hangover the way the technology bubble did in the early 2000s.

Jared: Yeah. I also think that it seems like the goal of the companies and the visionaries and the leaders involved are constantly pushing the platform to do more and get to the next step. So, do you see that as kind of a way that we are going to avoid the kind of dot-com bubble where people are getting more innovative and more strategic and really with leveraging the platform that we use?

Narinder: You know, I am not sure I would say it would take it differently, but I think your point has a really important resonance to it, which is this: That if you think about a lot of the business models, the ideas of the dot-com days, weren’t all that far off, they were just impossible to do technically. And they spent way more money and way more time than they should have to build the platforms that they had. So, in some cases we have seen a revisiting of companies and ideas that are eerily similar to companies that failed in the dot-com days, but today, because of the platforms you can build a company on, the cost to fail is less.

There are all of these thing that take away risk that weren’t there before. So, it is no longer a $100 million proposition to prove out a company is not going to work. And that is a result of a lot of the underlying platforms that people can start businesses on changing, and one part of that is technology platforms, things like AppEngine and Heroku, and Force.com, and Amazon, certainly, has totally changed the way to build a start- up.

It is also like all the incubators that are out there. Say you’ve got ways of trying and failing faster than you had before, and so that is also why it appears to be more of a bubble than it is, because you can churn companies faster now. You can churn the idea faster, and so you get to yes or no quicker than you did before, and so the velocity of startups has increased just the same way as the velocity inside of large companies trying to navigate their customers’ needs and wants has changed.

Mike: So, we are recording this, obviously, before it goes live, and not to date ourselves, but we got news today that Eloqua was acquired by Oracle. Any thoughts on that?

Narinder: Sure. We have already seen this. We know a few things as facts. History will tell us Oracle is acquisitive. That is certainly true. Oracle has not organically invested in the Cloud, rapidly enough. That’s been proven, too. And then, therefore, we should not be surprised at all when they are going to buy Cloud companies. I think the challenge for Oracle is the two most important properties in the Cloud market – Salesforce and Workday – aren’t for sale, alright?

So, there is zero chance of… What Oracle normally likes to do is buy – they bought Peoplesoft – they buy a significant piece. That option isn’t available to them in the Cloud world, so it’s a bit trickier for them. They have made some smart acquisitions. I like the companies they’ve bought. But, they haven’t been able to buy en mass the same way as they have in their on-premise world because the Cloud leaders are moving very quickly. So, I think they are trying to run the same play that they have before.

I think for Oracle that play makes sense, given their lack of organic progress toward Cloud. However, I think the impact is a little harder to pull in because they have to buy smaller pieces. They will have to integrate them. They won’t be able to just ride the maintenance payment. Switching cost is less. If they don’t serve Eloqua customers well, they’ll switch to Marketo.

So, I believe that’s pretty fundamentally different and so it is not going to be as simple as it was when Oracle bought Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards. I don’t necessarily think the same play will have the same kind impact. However, I do think for them, given their progress, or lack of progress on the organic side, it is a necessary move.

Mike: So, as we are slowly starting to wind down this interview, we have started asking our guests this theme question that we would love to hear from you. So, what is one thing that you do every day that makes you successful?

Narinder: So, the one is the critical piece that [inaudible 00:19:47] interview question that Chris Barbin, my co-founder and CEO, was in a piece in New York Times that was called “The Corner Office.” And he, often in interviews will ask a person for one word to describe themselves or three words to describe themselves. He said one of the immediate things that’s a negative for him is if they then use 17 words to describe themselves. One thing that I would call true…I would say this.

The one thing that I make sure I do every day is remember the overall market and the customer. So, there is not a day that goes by at Appirio that I don’t do something that both has relevance or brings me knowledge from the market and the customer and I try to tie them together as much as possible. So, for example, I would never go through a day where I am only reading industry reports or writing industry reports or something like that, and I would try to never go through a day where I only look – like even if I spent all day with a customer, that night I would try to look at what happened in the market and try to relate it to something that is happening with the customers.

Because, to me, the real opportunity is to take strategy, market, etc., and close the distance between that and execution. So the way I remind myself of that every day is to make sure that I try to do each of those, and wherever possible bring those together. So, if I can take something happening in the market and bring it to a situation that I’m talking about with a customer, that’s even better because I think it is really important that as an industry we learn to close that gap. So, that’s kind of my thing each day.

Mike: So, now you’re having me rethink whether we narrow it down to one thing or not. So, as we wind down, this will play in January, if we were to hit the fast-forward button and go to December 2013 and do a retrospect, what would you anticipate being the biggest story in Cloud for 2013?

Narinder: So, it’s like the question you know is coming but it is a hard question. I do think that when we get to 2013, I think the word “Cloud” will appear to have become less used, just because I do believe that it has become internalized enough that I think we have moved past the nonsense of “private Cloud” and “Cloud.” I think we’ve moved past all of that. I believe “Cloud” will become a proxy for fast and agile, and so you will really look at people trying to point to what’s next in technology, but they will still be trying to absorb that one.

So, we will see a rise in people talking about big data and mobile we already have, however the underlying element of what Cloud provides, speed and agility, will be the real story. So, the real story will be that we have companies that are of medium and large size that will be using seemingly new technology – and let’s leave it at that breadth- to actually change their business model. So the story for the first time, will be that even large companies can use the new generation of technology to disrupt their industry, and it is not simply a matter of waiting for startups to disrupt them.

Mike: Wow. Narinder, I can’t thank you enough for being on one of the very first episodes of the Button-Click Admin Podcast. You are definitely true to your word and jumping in early. If people want to follow you on Twitter, what is your Twitter handle?

Narinder: @singhns is my Twitter handle, and I would like to connect with any of you. Mike and Jared, thank you for putting this show on and thanks for having me.

Mike: Absolutely.

Jared: Thank you.

Mike: Jared, coming up, we will do final thoughts?

Jared: Final thoughts. That was great hearing from Narinder, hearing things that have gone on over the past six years with Appirio and even looking forward to the future. I think it definitely puts a strategic view to what we do, what our listeners do every day, start doing more, start being more visionary, and he also gives some great advice as to how we can do that.

Mike: I would agree. I think the one point that came out for me, definitely, is as careers evolve, as technology evolves, nothing ever gets complacent in your life. And that was to the point that I asked about, education. I don’t think education really ever stops, when you are out of college. And we are seeing that. I finished up with the winter of ’13 recertification. There was a lot of stuff I had to re-learn, because parts I didn’t touch. I think recognizing that education in life today will never stop, so when you stop at college, you aren’t done yet.

That’s the first step. And even once you are in a career, your learning and your educating doesn’t stop. I think back to the interview we did with you, which is also educating others and measuring your success on the ability to educate others. So, those were definitely two key points. Plus, I like the fact that maybe “Cloud,” the term is becoming less over-used and more of industry standard.

Jared: Yeah. Absolutely. I think the key is he really hit the nail on the head. I am looking forward to all of our next guests, and I think we will see the themes he mentioned throughout the year. It will be great.

Mike: Absolutely. Well, Jared, you know, this podcast is all about having great conversations with people who are working in the Cloud, and I imagine somebody listening has somebody in mind, or maybe themselves, with really great stories like Narinder. So, if they do, please reach out to us. I am buttonclickmike@gmail.com and Jared is buttonclickjared@gmail.com. And tell us about someone that has that great story and how we should have them on the show. Remember, this podcast is all about engagement, learning and sharing. I’m Mike, and he’s Jared.

Jared: We’ll see you in the Cloud.

Narrator: This has been the ButtonClick Admin Podcast. For more click-y goodness, visit buttonclickadmin.com. Remember, new posts go live every Monday morning at 10 a.m. central. If you liked what you heard, or if you didn’t, leave us a review on iTunes, and we’ll see you in the Cloud.

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