SHI CEO Thai Lee Explores the Changing Atmosphere of Cloud Computing

Organic growth takes SHI to being a $5B company

By Jeremy Geelan	Article Rating:
November 4, 2013 04:00 PM EST	Reads:	996

"When a company can combine scale with innovation...and can execute...then I think it can build a sustainable business," said Thai Lee, Founder, President & CEO of SHI International, as she opened 13th Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley today at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

Thai Lee's overall message was very much "Innovate or Perish" - or as she expressed it, "in order to remain sustainable you can to continue to innovate."

When she founded SHI in 1989, Thai Lee explained, “unified communications” involved pagers and payphones and the “Cloud” was a theory made impractical by the bandwidth of the time. As new technologies emerged, flourished and later became commoditized, she added, the businesses supporting those technologies often did the same.

Examining the past trends of the business of IT can help both business owners and IT managers meet the needs of their customers, she noted. And the audience in Santa Clara knew why they could trust on the validity of her advice: since 1989, she has transformed SHI from a $1 million software-only reseller to a $5 billion global solutions provider.

After Thai Lee has spoken, she ceded the keynote stage to SHI's GM of Cloud Services, Richard Place. He gave a brief overview of SHI's "Cloud Marketplace" and mentioned that further details of the specific technical and financial benefits of using the SHI Cloud Marketplace to discover, customize, and automate the provisioning of both large and small scale cloud services, using different providers and carriers, would be most readily available at SHI's breakout sessions here in Santa Clara at 13th Cloud Expo.

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Published November 4, 2013 Reads 996
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Jeremy Geelan is President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of Cloud Expo's "Power Panels" on SYS-CON.TV. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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