Break Free B2B Marketing: Kevin Jackson of GC GlobalNet on Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a topic that can be mystifying for many. The fact of the matter, however, is that the global public cloud service market is projected to exceed $266 billion this year. That’s a lot of companies doing a lot of business in the cloud. When it comes to making sense of this complex creation and the way it works, there are few experts more knowledgeable than Kevin Jackson.

Breaking free from blindly accepting cloud computing and moving toward an active, knowledgeable use of the technology is something all B2B marketers and business owners need to understand. It’s also something Kevin Jackson is especially good at, which is why we invited him to be the first speaker during Season 3 of our Break Free B2B Marketing interview series.

Kevin has spent the last seven years as the CEO of GC GlobalNet, a company whose goal is to “help professionals develop revolutionary business models that deliver quantum improvements to the bottom line.” He’s also a noted B2B marketing influencer, recently named as one of the Top 25 B2B Marketing Influencers to Follow in 2021, and is recognized for making complex topics easy to understand.  Long story short: he’s an expert on helping B2B businesses develop successful cloud strategies, and in today’s 26-minute interview with our own Nick Nelson, he’ll be passing some of that expertise on to you.

Break Free B2B Interview with Kevin L. Jackson

If you’re interested in checking out a particular portion of the discussion, you can find a quick general outline below, as well as a few excerpts that stood out to us.

• 1:35 – Introduction to Kevin Jackson
• 3:46 – Cloud as a Business Strategy
• 5:55 – How the World’s Approach to Cloud Has Changed in 2020
• 6:38 – Where 5G and Cloud Connect
• 7:26 – Edge Computing
• 8:15 – Kevin answers, “Are there any companies you’ve seen  or worked with that are adopting these technologies in unique ways?”
• 9:48 – Kevin answers, “What mistakes do you see being made right now that we need to get pas in order to move forward?”
• 11:11 – How Cloud can help us avoid any drawbacks of work changes in 2020
• 12:59 – Keeping Data Secure in the Cloud
• 14:09 – Cloud Computing One Year from Now
• 16:13 – How Kevin would advise a thought leader looking to better embrace cloud computing
• 17:38 – Becoming a thought leader and building a personal brand
• 21:00 – Credibility and responsibility as a thought leader
• 22:18 – Tenets of a successful engagement
• 23:42 – 5G conspiracy theories
• 25:30 – Top piece of advice for B2B leaders

Nick: Awesome. It’s quite a journey. So, one thing that you’ve said that I like is that, if you think about it, cloud computing is obviously very broad and kind of ambiguous, I think, to people. One thing that I’ve seen you say is that if you think about it as just simply a software and a technology, you’re thinking about it wrong, maybe too narrow of a view. You talk about it as a business strategy. Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Cloud computing actually is a model for doing business and in fact, it’s five different models. One of them is the way it’s a model for consuming information technology. And that’s what many people think about, but it’s also an economic model. It’s a model for how you pay for things. And that’s a service model where you pay as you go, pay by the drink, so to speak. There’s also a security model that you have to adopt. When you go to cloud computing, you go away from protecting your information with the infrastructure to a data centric, security model for protecting your information. And that’s because you no longer own the infrastructure that your information is running over. There’s also a different operational model. And, traditionally, when you have a data center, once you turn it on, they’re not turning it off because it may not come back on again. You run stuff 24/7, but in cloud, the most important aspect is actually the on, O N O F F switch, as I like to say. Because you need to turn off your consumption of it when you’re not using it. And finally, it’s a completely different acquisition model. You go from buying things to buying hours, or you go from this capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model where you are buying something by a specific metric. Like you buy a compute by the hour, or you buy software by the number of people. So it’s a completely acquisition model as well.

Nick: Right. So, switching gears a little bit from the industry a little bit to yourself personally. I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, I don’t know if you’d like to call yourself an influencer or a thought leader, none of the above, but you’re clearly an authority on these topics that you talk about. And I think there’s a lot of people that are interested in getting into that sort of position. So I’d like to talk a little bit about your journey and how you’ve reached this point. Obviously, a lot of it is just the professional journey you’ve followed and the experience you’ve gained, but there certainly needs to be a commitment to the personal brand building aspect of it. What has sort of been your, how have you gone about that and gotten to this point?

Kevin: First of all, you have to recognize that you have a career and your career is linked to an industry. It’s not linked to the specific company that you’re working in. So you have to keep an outward vision across the broader marketplace. And that’s sort of what I was doing. I saw cloud computing as the industrialization of information technology. I felt that it was really poised to revolutionize business like the assembly line revolutionized the automobile industry. And it was for the exact same reason, both are successful because they were able to drive down variability and cost through standardization. And the new business models would be revolutionary and drive global conductivity. So, because I saw myself as part of this industry, this global industry, I studied it because it represented the future of my career. Now, uh, there were issues and in many ways there may still be issues with respect to cloud computing.

Learn more from Kevin in our groundbreaking 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, where he joins other respected B2B marketers and business influencers to predict the next big shift.

Keep your eye on the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B Marketing interviews. Also check out episodes from season 1 and season 2.