Over the past few years “moving to the cloud” has been a key objective for many companies. With full cloud adoption in SME’s expected to reach 60% by 2020, the next challenge comes through the integration and standardisation of business processes across the various cloud software systems, driven largely by the accelerating advancement in machine learning and predictive analytics.

The strategy to move to the cloud was a gradual one for many businesses, over time one business function after the other would be migrated to cloud based SaaS (software) solutions. However, as cloud technologies matured, many companies were left with an expanding stack of cloud software applications that became increasingly misaligned as business and user requirements changed. In fact it takes an average of 15 Cloud Software applications to enable an SME to be 100% cloud. 

At the end of last year I decided it was time to change course in my career and get back to what I love doing. 

The past six weeks has given me the time and perspective to reflect on my very unconventional career and discover the common threads that have lead to various opportunities and experiences since I launched my first business in 2006. 

Over the years I have started everything from a car detailing business, a gym, a real estate portal, a marina development, technology consultancy, even an “adult products” web site. Why? I love the the process of designing and executing new business ventures. 

For me, the process of developing a business goes back to my childhood obsession with Lego. I would spend hours tinkering away building models of cars and spaceships, which I would proudly display on my bookshelf. Rarely did I use the instructions, I always wanted to build what was in my imagination, I wanted to build the spaceship I dreamt about with the oversized wings and rocket launchers. 

I’ve just got back from the craziest tech conference on the planet, Dreamforce. 

Since becoming a Salesforce customer, attending Dreamforce has been high on my priority list after countless tales from others in the Salesforce community. 

I’ve been to a lot of big tech conferences over the years, but the stats on this years Dreamforce were on another level.

• 171,000 Attendees
• 3,200 sessions
• 600 Product workshops
• Attendees from 83 Countries. 

All of this spread out of about 5 city blocks of San Francisco. 

Trying to summarise the learnings and experience in a blog post is difficult, so here are my highlights.

Cloud software vendors are at war.

For the past few years, the cloud software world has been dominated by the concept of add on’s. Each software add-on will generally focus on a specific industry vertical or business function, such as retail, point of sale, reporting or time management. 

These front-end software applications focus on making a set of business processes more efficient than their non-cloud counterparts, before shipping pieces of information (data) into a complementary application such as Xero or Quickbooks, where further processing of the data occurs. 

Recently i've been reviewing past cloud software implementations to find trends in successful implementations. Through this process I have confirmed a theory i've had for a number of years, moving to "the cloud" is a journey, not a destination. 

Watching the excitement building for the start of the 2016 Formula One season got me thinking and making comparisons between Formula One and my other passion, Startups.

Watching the way teams go about a race weekend has many similarities to the daily challenges of running a startup. You also see the impact of varying levels of funding and technical ability, together with constant need to manage PR and the expectations of fans.

Here are some F1 insights that you can apply to your startup.