Rob Kurver, serial entrepreneur at Innovatrs, explains how he entered into the world of Cloud Computing.

He co-founded Voipro in 2005, a hosted voice (SaaS telco) leader in the Netherlands, currently expanding to other countries. Rob is also a creator of websites, interactive magazines and communities for the iPad generation. He’s excited about being a part of the current IT revolution, the Third Wave.

Innovatrs: What made you do it? How did you become an entrepreneur?

Rob: I think it’s in my genes , I started my first company when I was in high school, 25 years or so ago, but even when I was an employee it was always as a co-owner of the company I worked for/at/with.

I co-founded Voipro, my latest venture, in 2005 when I was in-between interim-management jobs and looking at Internet telephony, more or less by accident. It seemed like a big transition for the classical telco’s was in the air: Skype launched 1 or 2 years earlier, but there was nothing much for SME’s. With all the benefits VoIP has to offer, it was (and still is) too complicated for the average SME, hence we figured we should offer it as a hosted service, in a SaaS model. Little did we know 4 years later cloud computing would be doing the same to IT! Anyway, it took about 3 months to flesh out the first ideas and write a business plan, and another 2 to find the seed funding and get started.

Innovatrs: What were your first steps after you fleshed out your @ha idea? What was your first crisis or hurdle?

Rob: Once we had the core team, the plan (ie focus) and the money, we started developing of own hosted voice platform and at the same time kicked off marketing and business development. This phase took a little over a year, with a small team. It’s important to do these in parallel. To be able to develop what the market seems to be actually looking for requires agility.

For a small company in a large telco world partnerships are critical. Our first crisis hit us in the first year when we had a falling out with our hosting/termination partner and had to become more self-sufficient all of a sudden. It turned out to be a great thing as it allowed us to build the platform more to our own specs and get more control.

Innovatrs: Have you experienced any great failures in the past and if so, how have they helped you get to where you are today?

Rob: All the time! Development always took longer then expected, the market back in 2006-2007 wasn’t quite ready for a SaaS telephony solution, and then in 2009 we had the economy reset to deal with. The latter proved beneficial as people started thinking harder about certain investments and about capital expenditure (buying a server or PABX) vs operational expenditure (hiring a service). In IT it led to cloud computing – in the telco world to hosted voice. And of course, these 2 areas are converging into hosted/managed forms of Unified Communication. In this converged world Voipro now have the platform, knowledge, experience and skills to provide the telco component, so now we find ourselves in a fast growing number of partnerships with IT vendors, integrators and hosters.

Innovatrs: It seems like all of sudden a lot of people are raving about Cloud Computing. What’s your opinion on the subject?

Rob: Cloud computing and SaaS (Software as a Service) is the natural way for IT and communications technology to develop. Pay per use, safe, simple, scalable. The customer (finally!) gets control over IT, by outsourcing it to specialists that have to earn his business every month again. And the specialist providers are able to make use of virtualisation, the cloud, to reduce cost per seat. Of course it’s going to take some time to move from break/fix models to service models, and it’s not going to work for all organizations, but cloud is definitely going to be the benchmark in a few years time. Just as most organisations no longer buy their company cars but lease them.

Innovatrs: Looking further into the future of the Cloud, what challenges will companies and customers face?

Rob: The biggest challenge we see as a SaaS communications provider is that customer’s IT staff and the resellers often feel threatened. They need to get used to the idea that the servers that run their applications are no longer physically accessible by them, and that they get different ways to guarantee quality and provide functionality. This is a process which will take some time as people need to acquire new skills and often need to get a different job description. The reseller needs to talk more about features and business processes with his customer, rather than technology. Not all existing resellers and IT-staff will be able to change in time, and a new generation of SaaS resellers and Managed Service Providers is already emerging. The biggest challenge is not learning something new but letting go of the old ways.

Another startup I’m currently involved with is dealing with very similar challenges. At Magnadd we develop interactive magazines and websites for the iPad generation of devices. Rich content, delivered from the cloud, with a lot of sharing/collaboration. Classical publishers are unable to deal with this change, due to a lack of expertise and focus. A small, focussed, energetic company like Magnadd is able to experiment, develop its own platform, and design beautiful new magazines/sites/campaigns making use of all the latest technology and concepts.

The incumbents have to see this new technology is not a threat to them but rather that it provides them with new possibilities and opportunities. Cloud computing is a major change as it enables technology to be deployed much more rapidly and cost effectively than before while also boosting innovation. Add to this a new generation of mobile devices, such as the iPad and the mobile Internet which makes the cloud always available and we’re looking at a totally different technology landscape, with an ever increasing role for startups and new ventures to find and develop new products and services. Exciting times indeed!