Top 8 Book Recommendations By Women In Cloud Network – August Edition 2018

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The list below includes book recommendations from the Women In Cloud Network. These recommendations were provided by Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Mary Alice Colvin, Jacquie Touma and Chaitra Vedullapalli.

  1. “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” – Gary Kasparov,
  2. “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow“- Yuval Noah Harari
  3.  “Tesla: Inventor of the Electric Age” by W. Bernard Carlson
  4. “Better Together” by Jonathan Sposato
  5. “The Leader Phrase Book” by Patrick Alain
  6. How To Build A Million Dollar Business With #Microsoft Cloud
  7.  “Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook For Business Leaders” – Mariya Yao
  8. “The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes” – William Ury

Let us know your recommendations that we can include in the September edition.  Enjoy the read!

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Special Offer – Discount Rate for 451 Research Summit

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We are excited to partner with 451 Research to host thought leadership conversations in the cloud industry at their 14th annual Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit. 451 Research’s, a leading information technology research and advisory firm, 14th annual Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS) will take place September 24-26 at Bellagio Las Vegas. As a valued media partner, Women in Cloud members can attend this year’s conference at an exclusive discounted rate. Register between now and August 31 for only $999!HCTS welcomes executives in the hosting, cloud, datacenter and managed services sectors to hear timely, actionable insight into the competitive dynamics of innovation from 451 Research analyst talent and guest speakers from AWS, Microsoft, Huawei, ING, DH Capital and more. By attending HCTS, you’ll gain access to a plethora of networking opportunities and 1:1 meetings with 451 Research analysts to discuss the impact of this year’s theme – the Age of Consumption – on your business.A few sessions we think you’ll find incredibly valuable include:

Building Partnerships with Hyperscalers – Hyperscalers continue to dominate the cloud market. Their scope and scale have enabled them to build rich service portfolios that are difficult to compete against. Rather than compete, there is an opportunity for service providers to partner.

Beyond Cloud – The Digital Revolution is powered by cloud but businesses and their service provider partners need a strategy to achieve digital transformation. “Beyond infrastructure” services will continue to be a vital maintenance capability that businesses look to service providers to offer – akin to changing the lightbulbs in the building. Going forward, however, there is also an opportunity to provide transformation-oriented professional services and multi-cloud/hybrid implementation to help businesses rewire the building support new requirements.

Winning at Every Stage of the Cloud Journey – Cloud is a journey, and different enterprises are at different stages in their quests for value-driving, utility-based computing. To stay relevant for the full journey, successful service providers will need to guide their customers thought this journey and anticipate their needs. Winning a customer at one part of the journey does not mean that you will keep them for the next stage.

Interested in sending 4+ team members?

Group pricing is available for companies interested in sending 4+ members of their team to HCTS. Contact Meghan MacDonald, Director of Marketing, to discuss your options.

[email protected]

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Bitlume @ Microsoft Build, Game Changer Event

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Bitlume an emerging leader for the premier live and on-demand secure streaming for all types of event. We are in an exuberant phase of identifying the right market that can scale our innovation in live stream distribution, monetization and viewer engagement.


To get off the ground we subscribed for the bare metal server from IBM SoftLayer, whipped up the box with CentOS and developed our base app on MEAN Stack. As we continue to build for the market, we are constantly evaluating our cloud architecture, how it integrates with external apps and to build for scale. We are currently evaluating whether to migrate to an affordable cloud offering that enables product build at scale without burning our pocket. We had a great opportunity, as part of the Women in Cloud Accelerator to attend the Microsoft Build Conference.

It was a spectacular and game-changing event for us, especially with our decision to migrate to Azure PaaS from IBM Cloud.




There were some advanced takeaways that we didn’t understand before: Cortana integrates with Alexa to facilitate seamless cross-platform meeting setup; a serverless state is to become midstream in app development in the near future, looks promising. Many interactive booths were intriguing and made the experience interactive and fun. I caught up with some expo presenters to understand their offering and how their service integrates with Microsoft offerings. Such discussions offered valuable information on the opportunity to plug and play with Microsoft cloud solutions.

Overall the vibe in the conference offered an open forum conversation between both the participant and the organizer. At the end of the conference, we were able to conclude our evaluation and have decided to port our product to the Azure PaaS offering which offers enough flexibility in open source application integration.

The entire Women in Cloud team also surprised us with an exclusive opportunity for Accelerator participants to attend the Microsoft Startup Build Welcome Reception with Satya Nadella, held after hours at Miller’s Guild in Seattle.

It was a pleasure to meet with Satya Nadella for a handshake and make a 10-second pitch about my startup Bitlume. He was receptive and spent about 10 minutes listening in to Entrepreneurs patiently.

The access that Women in Cloud have provided to companies like mine in the Accelerator is invaluable and their on-going support is amazing. Here’s to growing in the Azure Cloud!

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Women in Cloud Accelerator – Class of 2018

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On March 2nd, Women In Cloud Accelerator was launched with the Class of 2018 participants.

We congratulate and extend a warm welcome to the following companies who were qualified and attended the immersion session:

  • Clever Databases
  • Stylyze Inc.
  • Plantmatch, LLC
  • RightSciences
  • Daysaver
  • Agile Impact Group
  • Bitlume Inc
  • Computing Kids LLC
  • genneve
  • Automaton Marketing Inc.
  • Red Sky
  • Visual Media Group, DBA

The Women in Cloud, an organization dedicated to fostering women-led businesses to leverage cloud solutions and services to inspire their success and growth, launches their new Accelerator Lab.  The Lab is an immersive 6-month program to assist women-led companies to start and build their businesses with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft distribution channels.

“Super excited to accelerate our business and learn more about how we can learn from the Cloud and improve our business proposition, and I hope to get more clients,” said Amelia Neighbors, from Clever Databases.

The Accelerator Program has proven methodologies, resources, and tools to grow a business in the Cloud.  What is “Cloud”? According to Microsoft, “cloud is the delivery of computing services-servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and more-over the internet, the cloud”. What is it about Cloud computing and why is it so popular? The Women in Cloud Accelerator Lab, answers these questions and coaches women-led businesses, who want to accelerate their B2B solutions using Cloud Computing. The Accelerator Lab includes a 1-day workshop, targeting coaching, free migration to Azure, up to “100 hours of interactive training to discuss strategy, lead generation, co-selling, deal negotiation and pitch preparation”, and much more.

Feedback from the participants of 2018 Class:

“When successful women come together great things happen. Red Sky is thrilled to be part of Women in Cloud Accelerator program sponsored by Microsoft, HPE and hosted by Meylah. This is the missing link for our growth and boost in revenue leveraging the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program and secret sauce of the mentors. This is a huge opportunity for us to build our cloud business and utilize the support of these great partners along this exciting journey.” Sharon A. Davison, Ph.D. CEO Red Sky

“For the first time, I can see tangible ways to leverage the expansive networks of Microsoft and HPE to take my business to a B2B audience. They’re helping me visualize what a go-to-market cloud partnership looks like to grow my business.” Jill Angelo, CEO of genneve

“The journey to building a business in the cloud requires both a willingness to learn new ways of thinking about our business and a deeper understanding of the opportunities available.” Rebecca Ralston, CEO of Agile Impact Group

 

Gretchen O’Hara, VP Go-To-Market Strategy, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft, and one of the driving forces and founders of Women in Cloud, declares,  “We are deeply committed from Microsoft on this initiative, one of the things I am very excited to announce, is I have been working personally to get a Microsoft Executive assigned to each and every one of you as a mentor and advisor of this incubator, and I have been able to accomplish that.”

To learn more about Women in Cloud and the Accelerator Lab, go to www.WomeninCloud.com

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Stand Up. 100 Cloud Commitments

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When we started our journey with Women in Cloud last year,  we knew we wanted to ignite a conversation and drive action around diversity and inclusion.  We had a sense that a rising tide was coming and our timing was right for “less talk, more action,” but I’m not sure we could have predicted the amazing momentum in the national consciousness around these issues that have emerged in the last handful of months.

Perhaps I should not admit that I tuned in last week to the Oscars primarily to see the beautiful gowns.  I did. But I also listened with the hope that Hollywood would bring focus to the conversation around diversity in their industry.  I was not disappointed. When Frances McDormand asked all female nominees to stand up, I leaned forward in anticipation of what my gut told me would be a special moment.  Stand up she told the women, be recognized.  But then she went on to tell the powerful men and women in the room to support those standing by taking action — don’t just chat tonight at a party she admonished, but take real action and invite these women who stand to a meeting, give them access to opportunity.

I had what I’m now going to think of as my “Frances McDormand” moment  (sadly, without the fabulous gown) at the recent Women in Cloud Summit.  I looked around the room of almost 400  business leaders and amazing emerging talent and I asked them to figuratively stand up and take an action — make a pledge to give women access.  Access to mentorship, access to resources or tools, or access to programs and funding — there are so many ways to contribute.

We named this call to action the “100 Cloud Commitments” and our goal was to get the leaders in the room and those in our broader network to take 100 actions in 2018.  One hundred actions that create access for women entrepreneurs in Washington.

So how did we do? I’m happy to say we have great momentum with more than 50 committed actions to date from individuals pledging their own time to companies of all sizes committing resources for internal and external initiatives.  Here is a sample of some of the amazing commitments we’ve seen so far:

  • Microsoft and HPE jointly funded a 6 month accelerator program for 15 women-led companies to grow their ability to sell into the channel.
  • “I would mentor women to lead, to find their voice and claim a seat at the table,” said one leader who volunteered as a Women in Cloud mentor.
  • Gretchen O’Hara has been actively promoting the Women in Cloud efforts with leadership within the UN and local state initiatives
  • VC Gillian Muessig announced the $100M Sybilla Masters Fund to invest in women-led start-ups. The fund is named after an inventor whose corn milling device was the first invention to receive a patent in the American colonial era.
  • Multiple women have signed up to be technical mentors in leading-edge cloud technologies such as containers, Kubernetes and Docker.
  • Carrie Francey, VP at HPE, signed up to lead an “opportunity circle,” a networking program where women come together to help others achieve their business goals.
  • Michele Keeffe, the veteran entrepreneur and technology marketer, pledged to connect women in technology to the people, leaders, jobs, and companies that will move them closer to their dreams.

I also took a pledge that day.  With a college-age daughter, my interests lie in advising and helping young women carve their career path into tech, particularly into product-oriented roles and I’m mentoring several young women who are starting their career.

So, are you ready to stand up?  We can help. Let us connect you to one of the many women who raised their hand as part of the Women in Cloud Mentor Network. Or, do you have a pledge of your own ready to put into action? Are you ready to support women with access to opportunities? We invite you to help the community hit our 100 Cloud Commitments goal. Reach out to Wendy White here.

Want to hear more about 100 Cloud Commitments?  Check back regularly as we’ll be announcing more each month.

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