How One SMB Rewrote IT, Starring CloudHow One SMB Rewrote IT, Starring Cloud

Microsoft SkyDrive Vs. Dropbox, Google: Hands-On

Consider it a literary revision of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" adage.

As the Great Books Foundation adapts to massive changes in the publishing industry and to how people read, it has likewise overhauled its IT strategy for the modern era. The educational nonprofit has moved much of the operations that support its mission to the cloud, relying on new technologies to promote a longstanding medium: the book.

"We're standing at the edge of the transition in education from paper-based books to e-books and e-material," said Great Books Foundation CFO James Linday. "And of course, nobody really has any idea how it's going to work out there on a broad scale."

Great Books must move into that great unknown while maintaining business as usual: Some 1 million students, 35,000 teachers, and 800 book groups use its programs. The organization also runs a full-fledged online store. It does everything with just 50 employees and a correspondingly small IT staff. As Great Books tries to answer big questions about the era of e-books and the future of reading, it has had to redirect its IT talent accordingly.

[ Read about another company's cloud transformation: Jordache Redesigns IT Around Cloud, Google. ]

"How do we sell an e-book? How do we provide a classroom of e-books in the future?" Linday asked. "It makes an awful lot more sense to have people like [VP of IT] Mark [Gillingham] and [director of IT] Ellen [Youniss] working on those kinds of questions than saying the server needs to be rebooted or the accounting system doesn't work."

Many of those practical IT needs, and the pain points that come with them, resemble similar functions at for-profit small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Great Books' strategy for fulfilling those needs without draining an already shallow pool of resources does, too: It's offloading much of that work to the cloud.

The foundation's transition from on-premises to online began with its legacy accounting system, which Linday said was "a good system 15 years ago" but an increasing source of headaches. "Not only was this system causing us current problems, but it was definitely going to inhibit us in the future," Linday said. Moreover, he and Mark Gillingham, the VP of IT, realized that IT was pinned down exclusively in a maintenance role rather than adding any value to the Great Books mission. They began an "exhaustive" evaluation process of their options, and the cloud move began when they settled on Intacct to replace the previous accounting system. It similarly switched its traditional phone system to M5's VoIP platform.

Today, employees do much of their work online. Great Books uses Moodle and Adobe Connect for online training and meetings. It dumped its email server in favor of Google Apps, which it uses also for collaboration--though it continues to maintain traditional Microsoft Office licenses. Web and other servers are now largely with Amazon Web Services, which it also uses to host video and store large files. The organization also has embraced open source for some needs--SugarCRM is critical to daily operations, for instance, and Great Books used osCommerce behind its online store before recently switching to Magento. It also runs the LAMP stack on its servers, and its website is powered by the Typo3 content management system. Great Books now supports only two major pieces of infrastructure in-house, a file server and Windows terminal server system, although even those are relied upon less and less. It's well on its way to being an all-cloud company.

The organization measures return on investment in a variety of ways, from its ability to reallocate resources to the fact that it no longer pays the electric bill on an air-conditioned server closet. Linday also sees a forward-looking ROI: "We've set the stage for a 25% increase in [sales] volume," he said. "Hopefully, it will come--and we don't see the need to add any additional staff to make that happen."

Linday recounted another facet of ROI. When Chicago, where Great Books is based, recently hosted the G-8 Summit, there were significant concerns about potential violence near the organization's offices. Executives made the call to temporarily close the offices and have everyone work from home. Linday estimated they operated at 80% of normal volume, and none of their customers knew the office was shut down. "I hope we don't have to do that again, but we demonstrated to ourselves that these cloud-based applications have more advantages than just my--the numbers guy--counting that they're more cost-efficient," Linday said.

Gillingham, the VP of IT, sounds a lot like his peer executives at other SMBs when discussing the appeal of the cloud. "We are a pretty small place and we have a really small IT team," he said. "Putting things off to other people or organizations to do has been a strategy." In a sense, Gillingham's user base extends well beyond the 50 employees--it includes the thousands who consume and discuss Great Books' material and who expect technology to help them do so.

Moving the IT backbone to online isn't without its hiccups. Youniss, the IT director, said the fundamental changes to how the company controls and accesses its accounting data, for example, have caused some reporting headaches and related issues. The IT team also realized that its existing T-1 service wasn't sufficient to meet the increased bandwidth needs that come with near-total reliance on the Web. It eventually upgraded to fiber, which Youniss noted was a significant but necessary expense to ensure optimal performance.

Gillingham pointed out an interesting challenge that comes from relying on applications that don't follow old-world software release cycles. "That turns out to be one of the downsides of Google Apps: It changes more than we do," he said. "That throws [users] off. We're used to using our yellow pads for decades, rather than changing software every month or so. Even little things like a cosmetic change on a page sometimes gets a reaction from one of our staff."

In fact, that's a key reason why Great Books continues to use the desktop version of Microsoft Office. Several years back, the organization tried to cut costs by dropping the ubiquitous productivity suite in favor of Open Office, but users revolted--they kept using Word and Excel even though IT was no longer supporting them. "Microsoft over the years has done an unbelievable job of trying to instill in our basic DNA that we can't live without [Office]," Linday said. That's slowly beginning to change; Gillingham noted that editors that once spent much of their day in Word, for example, are now increasingly using Google Docs, particularly when collaborating with people spread around the globe.

Indeed, users don't always love every aspect of the Great Books' move to the cloud. "Users always resist change," Gillingham said, adding that IT has tried to tout the advantages of new technologies rather than simply saying they are required by the company. "We've had so few resources in the past that having any resources at all seems like candy. We've tried to use carrots rather than sticks to try to get people to conform to the applications that we can support."

Cloud services can play a role in any BC/DR plan. Yet just 23% of 414 business technology pros responding to our 2011 Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Survey use services as part of their application and data resiliency strategies, even though half (correctly) say it would reduce overall recovery times. Our The Cloud's Role In BC/DR report shows how the combination of cloud backup and IaaS offerings can be a beneficial part of a "DR 2.0" plan. (Free registration required.)