Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.
Bob Kelly - Corporate Vice President, Microsoft's Windows Azure Marketing, Microsoft


Biography
Kelly began his career with Microsoft in 1996 with the Windows NT Server 3.51 marketing team. He later transitioned to group manager of Windows NT Server and Windows 2000 Server marketing. Following the launch of Windows 2000 Server, Kelly helped to form the company’s U.S. subsidiary. He has held a series of marketing and product management roles, both in the field and corporate offices, such as general manager of Windows Server Product Management and general manager of infrastructure server marketing. Recently, Bob was named CVP for Windows Azure Marketing focusing on Microsoft’s cloud platform execution.
A Massachusetts native, Kelly earned his master’s degree and doctorate in English literature from the University of Dallas. In addition to enjoying spending time at home with his wife and four children, he’s active in local civic organizations.
The Interview
1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers
Bob Kelly (BK): At the end of the day, enterprises (business, government, non-profits) want to reach more customers to grow their revenue or expand their influence. For many of these enterprises, IT has gotten in their way because of how computing is managed. Cloud allows management to focus on the things that differentiate them to unlock potential and focus on what they are good at; growing their business.
2. What makes cloud computing disruptive?
(BK): Cloud changes the fundamental economics of how an enterprise thinks about IT. Large capital expenditures (capex) are a burden. Cloud flips capex into an operational expense (opex), meaning enterprises only use the resources needed when they need them. This helps enterprises to focus on the things they care about. In the past, 70% of IT was spent on maintaining its capability and 30% was bringing real value. Cloud fundamentally flips this around by disrupting the cost structure and drives cost down. Cloud allows enterprises to differentiate on who they are instead of focusing on IT.
3. What is the next big thing in Cloud Computing?
(BK): Cloud will become core to everything we do in computing and will allow enterprises to go in directions that have not yet imagined. Just thinking about my own situation, the cloud creates the opportunity for me to expand my customer base and shift my focus from developers and IT operations to include end users. We move from an $80B software category to a $1T services category. That’s exciting!!!
Cloud is an easy ramp for start-ups. We can take a new idea for a business or service and act overnight. Cloud creates acceleration from insight to reality which results in a torrid pace of new innovations that get access to these capabilities. This creates a real transformation of how enterprises work, and how quickly ideas come to fruition.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Cloud Computing?
(BK): A lot!!! There are three layers of the cloud platform. Software delivered as service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion today about what these all mean and how they are delivered through either a private cloud which an enterprise manages or through a public cloud delivered as a service.
Microsoft is building an end to end stack of software that crosses all these elements. This allows the enterprise to span both public and private bridging between their existing IT assets and new cloud based opportunities essentially creating a single unified vision. . Today, you see vendors in different pieces of that stack. Google is in the platform stack. Amazon is in the infrastructure stack. Salesforce is in software as a service. We have a broader and deeper play across cloud and give customers choice in terms of how they consume it. We deliver a fullness of the capabilities of the platform. We bet heavily on all three levels of the stack on ramp and integrated end state.
5. Where do you see technology convergence with Cloud?
(BK): Think of a couple scenarios. The consumerization of IT (CoIT) is important because IT wants to get out of the business of provisioning, managing, and securing all these endpoints. In reality, this should be a software problem. We are all over this.
Telematics, the integration of computing and wireless connectivity is another. An example of this is our work with Ford Sync and Toyota both hosted on our Azure cloud service. By leveraging telematics and the power of the cloud, these companies are able to use customer generated data to make smart decisions, innovate, and accelerate pace of insight and change at the same time, improving the experience for their customers.
Cloud is going to be a pervasive capability. It will just be expected that your refrigerator is hooked up to the cloud and that car is hooked up and when you receive something it’s backed up locally to the cloud. It will become a natural part of our everyday lives.
6. If you weren’t focused on Cloud Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?
(BK): My background is a bit diverse. I have a Masters and PhD in Shakespearean literature. I always thought I’d be a teacher. I started Microsoft as a 2 day contractor. While cool technology and driving results is core to what I do today, I am still a teacher; I listen, I help and I drive better decision making. If I were to do anything different, I would focus full time on being an academic.
It’s interesting to think of the Cloud in terms of academia. When I was in grad school, I wrote my dissertation by going to the library and borrowing periodicals and books off the shelf. The Cloud opens access to ideas and information. The technology available today to both students and institutions can fundamentally change the way that academia is run. This could be scary because it disrupts the safe, insular environment that have been the foundation of academia for many years, but at the same time it is transformational and will unleash new ideas and capabilities that we can only dream about today.
7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time>
(BK): I have 2 answers. The first is non–traditional – Alice in Wonderland’s looking glass. I say this because that’s an analogy that I’ve always held of how I do my job. I talk about it all the time. I like to live on the other side of the looking glass. It’s not quite right but you have to go with it to see what it could possibly be.
The other one would be Dr Who’s Police Box. You get to live in other worlds and explore. And heck it’s a bit eccentric.

Your POV
What do you think? Got a question for Bob?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.
Additional interviews will be added and updated!  To be considered for the series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
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