Telegraph chief sings praises of cloud computing

The chief information officer (CIO) of the Telegraph newspaper today described how cloud computing was one of the main technologies moving the group into the future.

Paul Cheesbrough, who previously worked for the BBC Digital Media Group, was speaking at a Salesforce.com customer event in London and described how the Telegraph Media Group had already embraced cloud technology.

He said that the media industry was going through a major amount of change, which some sceptics called trouble while he preferred to describe it as transformation'.

"It's a business steeped in legacy and is 150 years old - a production cycle every 24 hours printed to produce content at 10pm to doorsteps at 7am," he said.

"We're moving from that world into something that is very much real time, digitally lead and two-way. Our relationship with our customers now means they feed back to us and we feed back to them in much faster cycles."

Cheesbrough described how these changes meant that the Telegraph had to embrace new technology, and cloud technology was at its "sweet spot".

He said that the Telegraph used Salesforce.com's cloud technology for call centres and the service cloud, the subscription business, advertising and sales.

The Telegraph then used the Salesforce.com platform for the Google DoubleClick.com network and could see which campaigns were performing and underperforming and then take the appropriate action.

"We've got a vision that we can run most of the back office in the cloud," Cheesbrough said of the Telegraph's future.

"Over the past year I've been able to free up 25 per cent of our team to really focus on things that really matter to the company like building revenue streams."

Last year, IT PRO reported on how the Telegraph group had already moved 1,400 seats from Microsoft Office to the web-based Google Apps .