by Michael Kelly

Since our launch in 1915, Nebraska Book Company has seen the textbook industry evolve and enter the digital age. With e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com and eBay.com ushering in a new way of buying and selling books, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the customer relationships of the past. In order to compete, textbook resellers like us are acknowledging the need to be armed with more information to better serve their customers.

In an age of rapid innovation, industries such as these are continuously being disrupted. As a result, agility in terms of sharing and understanding customer needs has never been more crucial to staying competitive and impacting bottom-line results in any business. Yet, according to recent research conducted by CMO Council, only 21 percent of customers believe the companies they do business with are good at providing tailored, relevant service; and 54 percent of customers are ready to ‘break up with brands’ due to the flood of irrelevant messages and impersonal engagements.

Fortunately, cloud technologies have emerged over the last six years and are providing businesses like us the tools to quickly respond to market challenges and transform sales to meet individual customer needs. This insight and accessibility is enabling businesses to increase their return on investment. To give you a better idea of how this works, there are three specific benefits we’ve experienced by moving to the cloud.

How BYOD Led to PYOC (Pick Your Own Cloud)  

 by Hormazd Romer

It’s probably the most basic IT service of all: Users need their files. And now that the typical mobile worker is carrying 3.5 devices, including a tablet, they need their files on multiple devices, probably running different operating systems.

Most users have purchased some or all of those devices themselves. The majority of enterprises (72 percent, according to a recent survey by B2B International now support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, giving users permission to access enterprise data with whatever smartphone or tablet they decide to purchase.

Just as users took the initiative on purchasing devices, so too they’re taking the initiative now on signing up for file-sharing and synchronization (FSS) services to make their corporate files available across those devices. End users have decided to do this, in part, because the BYOD revolution caught many IT organizations and IT vendors by surprise and traditional IT communication services simply don’t meet the needs of mobile users in BYOD environments.