"Cloud Computing removes the risk and allows you to try before buying," stated Carlos Polo, CEO & Founder of Doocuments, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Polo continued, "Cloud Computing helps you save money and stay focused on your business and eliminates technology complexity."

Cloud Computing Journal: A very general question first, about Cloud Computing itself: Surely we've heard all of this before in various forms and guises - grid computing / utility computing, etc.? What is different this time - why is everyone so convinced it will now work?

Carlos Polo: It is easier for everyone to believe and start adopting a trend once the market is massively pushing a technology. Cloud Computing (or whatever name used for this topic) is a technology that helps you save money, helps you stay focused on your business and eliminates technology complexity. Communications, security and software technology is also mature enough to support this revolution. These are the main reasons why we think Cloud Computing is convincing everybody.

Cloud Computing Journal: What are the three main factors driving companies toward the Cloud?

Carlos Polo: The three main factors are:

1. It dramatically lowers the IT costs of a company. With SaaS products, companies won't have to pay large software license fees or buy expensive hardware and infrastructure to run the applications on-site. No hidden maintenance or upgrading services - since Doocuments hosts your documents, we absorb those costs so that you don't have to. You won't have to employ expensive IT staff to look after the portfolio of on-premise applications.
2. Trusted service: You use Cloud Computing like an utility - you must trust the service and main vendors are offering critical SLA, much better than companies can get by themselves: three nines of reliability and redundant, less than 300 ms load time, secure for your customer data and transparent
3. Risk and TCO reduction: Software history indicates that it's difficult not to succeed with unpredictable costs. On-premise had "hidden" costs (hardware, software, resources, and especially upgrade issues). Cloud Computing removes the risk and allows you to try before buying, not simply buying "demoware," and finally, Cloud Computing has the lowest TCO overtime.

Cloud Computing Journal: And what are the three main barriers preventing some companies from moving some of the on-premise computing to the Cloud?

Carlos Polo: Cloud computing can potentially deliver 20% or more cost savings and enable more rapid and scalable system deployment while leaving individual departments to make independent decisions, instead of giving up authority to participate in shared-service programs. However, product and service maturity, portability, performance, maturity of the internal IT organization and government-specific compliance requirements (such as control over the data location) still represent major barriers to public cloud computing adoption.

Cloud Computing Journal: How does your own company's offering/s assist CIOs and organizations/companies?

Carlos Polo: Doocuments users don't need to worry about "What happens with confidential information." They will know how a client or partner uses a certain documents; they will be able to prevent information leaks and fulfill confidentiality contracts. They will be able to save IT resources because they won't need an IT department to manage VIP documents anymore, and will not have to worry about losing important information.

On the other hand you're actually safer with Doocuments. Since your data is hosted on Doocuments' reliable and redundant data centers, you can stop saving your corporate data on insecure devices, a leading cause of data security problems. Cloud computing vendors such as Doocuments have a much better security record than most commercial and government organizations, especially those organizations that have employed external contractors to manage the applications and data. Our infrastructure is composed of various identical systems. Each single piece of data is replicated in multiple datacenters, so your Doocuments are replicated to a primary and a backup data center that are replicated in real time.

Sales representatives will have greater sales success by controlling their sales proposals all the time. Doocuments makes it possible to know the perfect moment to take action. They will know better how their customer is going to behave when negotiating with them and what subjects they should dig deeper.

R&D departments will have absolute compliance with the term "Confidential" and the sensitiveness of the important information. Doocuments users will be able to check accesses in detail. No one can steal confidential information and no document will leave the organization.

Cloud Computing Journal: Are there other players in the Cloud ecosystem offering the same - or is your company unique? Why?

Carlos Polo: There are several companies that have similar services and products, such as Watchdox, Yousendit or Box.net. However, our technology is completely different and that is the most important differentiation: We have created a new document format, a "smart document format" that allows users to add value to documents once they transform their documents into Doocuments. Once they do that, Doocuments add a lot of metadata that will be used during the next versions of the product. Today Doocuments is about document sharing, secure extranets and data leak prevention... We can now say that there is nobody offering exactly the same as Doocuments - sharing VIP documents online, adding special properties to them, such as dynamic behavior of the document over time.

Tomorrow, Doocuments will be about readers and reading experience. This will be our special feature. Readers will beg for receiving docs in Doocuments' format.

Cloud Computing Journal: We hear talk of a Cloud Revolution and also of a Cloud "evolution" - either way, what kind of time span are we talking about, do you think. In other words, for how long is Cloud Computing going to exert its pull on the minds, hearts, and budgets of all involved in modern-day Enterprise IT?

Carlos Polo: We really think that Cloud Computing is here to stay forever. No doubt about it.