IT research for Cloud Reach

Small Company – Cloudreach

Cloudreach is regarded as one of the best amongst UK's small companies. The company was founded in the year 2009 and has its headquarters in London. The company operates with a mission of 'Make it happen: Being a unified cloud service provider for clients', and within just a few years of its operation has won the award for UK's 'Best small company to work for' (b.co.uk, 2013).

The reason for selecting Cloudreach is very interesting. Cloudreach has made some amazing clients like Liverpool football club, and Kempinski hotels within just 4 years of their operation (nfia.co.uk, 2013). The company operates in a very niche segment of IT servicing model, wherein it helps its clients to migrate their traditional data and systems to Amazon serviced remote cloud. This serves as a great business enabler for firms, who are not able to scale up due to tedious and outdated legacy system and databases. Most importantly, it serves those companies which do not have the in-house skills to migrate to Amazon web services. Apart from facilitating the transition, it also provides monitoring and support facilities for smoother business execution. Within a very short span, the company has made great reputation amongst its clients. Apart from the functional aspect, the company is also known for leadership and meritocracy based functioning, with no hierarchy at their office.

Originally started as a small private firm by two entrepreneurs, the company had an initial presence only in the UK. But, recently, the company has expanded ties with Foreign Investment agency of Netherlands (nfia.co.uk, 2013), and is expanding into Europe, more specifically Netherlands, as it provides a high 'cloud maturity' and 'highly connected' marketplace for expansion. The firm has assumed a multi-national figure, with founder Pontus Noren and James Monico, believing that Netherland market is very similar to South East England (nfia.co.uk, 2013).

Large company – Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs is an American multinational company which was founded in 1869 and has its headquarters in New York. The client base of the company spans across a diversified base of financial institutions, governments, corporations and high-net-worth individuals. The company operates with the core value that 'Our assets are our people, clients and reputation'. Its undertakings are always with a 'clients interest first' approach (goldmansachs.com, 2015).

The reason for selecting Goldman Sachs is the vast business segments in which the company operates, allowing us enough scope for research and understanding. The business segments in which it operates are investment banking, investing and lending, investment management, global investment research and institutional client services.

With regard to its products and services, primarily, the company offers advice on mergers and acquisitions, asset management, financial advisory services, divestitures, underwriting services, prime brokerages for its clients, restructurings, risk management, public offerings, etc. (goldmansachs.com, 2015). Apart from that it also indulges in private equity deals and market making for its clients (bloomberg.com, 2015).

The company has a worldwide presence with European headquarters in London, Asian headquarters in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and other major offices in Bangalore, Jersey City, etc. Overall, it operates with 73 offices worldwide, with an employee base of over 32900 employees (bloomberg.com, 2015). It has been on Fortune's '100 best companies to work for' list, due to the philanthropic support which it provides to its employees. It also maintains a 'donor advised fund', which makes generous donations to charitable organisations across the world.

Moving ahead, the company expects a modest growth in Europe, huge potential in the equity market in Japan, long-term challenges in UK, slowing growth in China and other markets in 'emerging countries', 'above-trend' growth in the United States, and decline in commodities market of Australia (blackrock.com, 2014).

Using the course material you are now required to make further assumptions and write an industry research paper that will describe the business communications and business systems relying on the network-related elements of these two organisations.  While the textbook provides you with technical information of network operation, you need to take the higher level view of how the networks can provide and help the management of the organisations.  You need to differentiate the use of the networks between these two organisations. A larger organisation would have more complexity due to the factors outlined in the first assignment specifications. A smaller organisation may not have the necessary infrastructure as one would expect.

You need to familiarise yourself further with these two organisations and create an understanding how they would conduct their business (email, network connectivity), local or global, small family business. Consider that different types of businesses even in the same sector might have different requirements. Determine if the organisation is owned by another (this information may be available on the internet) and how that might have an impact on the use and design of communications in the organisations. Some of your assumptions can be based on what you may already know about an organisation. As you do your research, online, journal articles, or books, use the information from your reading to build support and arguments using Harvard citing.

Once you have built up a picture of these organisations network usage and design, you will then have integrated the course material in your description while focusing on the specifics of each organisation.  You are not required to contact anyone from these organisations.

Business communication and business systems have a strong reliance on the existing network structure of a company. For a mid-sized enterprise like CloudReach, company network plays a crucial role in facilitating coordination and information sharing between the remote workers and offices, through a VPN connection over the internet. Most importantly, it is the backbone for most remote support services that they provide to their clients. Similarly, huge organisations like Goldman Sachs employ dedicated WAN to achieve efficient network support. This robust infrastructure helps them in undertaking the basic business functions like customer relationship management, sales team management, human resource management, and knowledge management.

Introduction

Network infrastructure and management are one of the most crucial factors for the success of a business enterprise. With rapid globalisation and the need for diversification, organisations seek to gain an advantage of better business opportunities available at remote locations, other than their head office. For small and mid-sized organisations, who are yet in an expansionary mode, the idea of expansion and network management is primarily to build strong chains for collaboration and resource sharing. Given a few resources that they have at their disposal, these companies have an option of employing cloud services to meet key business needs (cloudreach.com, 2014). With access to all forms of business supporting software and hardware solutions, on a license basis, the companies can divert their key resources towards building core competencies, while at the same time ensuring that they remain scalable, flexible, and secure (channelinsider.com, 2014). Similarly, large enterprises who have enough resources at their disposal can afford dedicated resources for network management. Their need for data storage, retrieval, sharing and management is also quite more as compared to small enterprises. For them, the company network acts as a key enabler for carrying out the day to day operations and stakeholder management of the firm (Endlich, 2013).