Friends ask me why I recently joined docAssist as CEO. Most of my career has been spent in large companies. docAssist is a small company, although a fast-growing one. Why am I here, first as an investor and board member, and now as CEO?
The article below really says it all. The cloud is the future. At a time when companies, government, and non-profit organizations are trying to save money as well as to improve productivity, quality, and service, the cloud provides a way to meet this challenge. I’m now at docAssist because I believe in the cloud and of course because I believe that docAssist has a valuable cloud-based solution.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 31, 2011, on page A27 of the New York Times with the headline: Tight Budget? Look to the ‘Cloud’.
Tight Budget? Look to the ‘Cloud’
By VIVEK KUNDRA
Published: August 30, 2011
Cambridge, Mass. AS the global economy struggles through a slow and painful recovery, governments around the world are wasting billions of dollars on unnecessary information technology. This problem has worsened in recent years because of what I call the “I.T. cartel.” This powerful group of private contractors encourages reliance on inefficient software and hardware that is expensive to acquire and to maintain.
In one particularly egregious example of waste, the Defense Department last year pulled the plug on a personnel system devised by Northrop Grumman after spending approximately $850 million on it in 10 years.
When I joined the Obama administration as the chief information officer, we quickly discovered vast inefficiencies in the $80 billion federal I.T. budget. We also saw an opportunity to increase productivity and save costs by embracing the “cloud computing” revolution: the shift from hardware and software that individuals, businesses and governments buy and then maintain themselves, to low-cost, maintenance-free services that are based on the Internet and run by private companies.