Cloud collaboration Tool lowers American Golf Association costs

Jessica carroll--is a solo director of information technology at the American Golf Association (USGA), but he's not a golfer, he's just doing his job, it's a very broad range of work, ranging from rule making, Field turf research to promote the development of 1500 golf communities across 110 States and regions of the Golf Association. For his work, Carroll described his own: "My work is internal and external balance, not only in the computer room and the server, but also to go outside with the external implementation of the cooperative work of many Parties." ”

In order to better their own understanding of the concept, for many years Carroll have been at the headquarters of USGA meetings, to the local golf association representatives to teach how to use technology to achieve the pipeline operation, so that they can focus on hands-on experience in the development of the golf movement itself. Carroll consider using cloud Synergy tools to help work, such as Cisco's WebEx, Citrix's GoToMeeting, and SaaS services like Microsoft's Live Meeting. Eventually USGA chose Microsoft's Live Meeting product to reach its expectations.

"In 2006, it was unheard of to hold a three-day meeting through the cloud, especially in the context of my work." Carroll said: "However, the online conference has doubled the number of participants by four times times." A large meeting in the form of SaaS services through the web has taken us a huge step in synergy. ”

Under Carroll's example, USGA's other agencies soon began interacting with thousands of volunteers through the web, saving hundreds of thousands of of dollars in costs. The IT team also started exploring cloud computing solutions in the following areas: Business continuity, business applications, and multimedia storage.

TJ Keitt, an analyst at Forrester Institute Inc., believes the Golf Association's example represents the rise of cloud collaboration tools across the country last year. Keitt recently wrote in its report, "making the SaaS and collaboration marriage Work": "The economic downturn has forced businesses to cut costs and travel with the brunt of the cost." "In the report, Keitt predicts that 71% of U.S. companies will start investigating or trying to collaborate on software in the next 12 months."

Cloud collaboration helps reduce costs

You might think that turf research is not a sophisticated field of rocket technology, but it's really the key to golf. and USGA's turf and Environmental Research department has saved 250,000 of dollars in travel by interacting with students, high school, golf clubs and golf course executives through the web.

"This is already a huge number for our team, and other companies should be able to get higher levels of cost reduction," Carroll said. This cost-saving approach does not affect our work itself, but instead it improves. "It is surprising that now USGA communication has been 100% dependent on the cloud implementation, and that it no longer deploys the corresponding conferencing software, Carroll said that" the technical team has no need to undertake any work. "

The USGA now has 70 servers supporting the business, and its 350 employees each have a PC. Carroll expects to reduce these infrastructures further by migrating to cloud computing or virtualization over the next 12-24 months. For example, USGA through IBM's smart Business Storage Cloud to achieve business flexibility strategy, Carroll that this is her work in the USGA 21 years of the most important thing to do.

As for disaster preparedness, it has nothing to do with cost savings, Carroll said: "The investment in this area is for the sake of insurance, and this part of the cost of the overall budget is not small." "Before adopting a cloud-based continuity strategy, USGA is sending tapes out every week for disaster preparedness, but the newer the better for data recovery, as Carrol says:" Nightly backups include domain controllers, data, and the core elements required for any recovery effort. ”

Collaborative tools enable CRM to migrate to the cloud

Carroll also developed a cloud-based and self service Customer relationship management system to enable the USGA and regional golf associations to manage data on the membership, Kick-off time, and rental of the ball car. She surveyed several vendors and eventually selected Microsoft, because Microsoft promised to help customize the CRM system and deploy the system in a way USGA envisioned.

Carroll that the Pay-as-you-go model for cloud computing is a huge boost for CRM: "Now look at the associations ' attitude towards the product, we've found the solution, but they have the final say." ”

USGA's next cloud computing program includes an application development and testing environment, as well as multimedia storage for image images, including successive U.S. Open after 1954. Carroll said: "We have a lot of light images, not to mention the picture." I can't say where the information is now. Cloud storage is a cost-effective option relative to expensive internal deployment storage. We know that 1PB of internal SAN architecture storage needs 300 million of dollars, which is unbearable. ”

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