Businesses Use the Cloud to Stay Competitive
March 5, 2013
Grazed from BizTechMagazine. Author: Steve Zurier.
For mobile solutions developer Mobiquity, running a business in the cloud makes perfect sense. As a startup, Mobiquity made the fiscal decision to leverage cloud-based infrastructure versus building out costly on-premises services. In the beginning, it used Google Apps and cloud-based storage. That was then.
As demand soared for enterprise mobile solutions, applications and websites, Mobiquity, too, grew exponentially, says Infrastructure Architect Tim Harney. The Boston-area company launched in April 2011 with just a handful of employees. By the end of 2012, it had 160 full-time people. And the company — whose clients include Weight Watchers, Fidelity and the New York Post — expects that in 2013 it will employ nearly 300 people. That doesn’t mean it’s outgrown the cloud. “As the company grew, we found that in Google Apps, there was no real sync tool to integrate Microsoft Outlook on a Mac,” Harney says. “I got some feedback from people wondering why we couldn’t use Microsoft Exchange.”…
Although some change was inevitable to support a growing workforce, Mobiquity stuck with the cloud, signing on to use Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based offering. Harney says the company determined Office 365 was mature enough, with the applications and IT services Mobiquity needed. With Office 365, users could sync calendars and contacts from their notebooks to their smartphones, and Microsoft’s Lync Online added instant messaging, VoIP calls, web conferencing and video chat to the mix…
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