By Ken Stephens, senior vice president, Cloud Services, Xerox
I read it and smiled, glad to see there is a dose of honor and humility left in professional football.
“This is a team game, and selflessness is a part of it … To get the praise from your teammates, it’s the ultimate in team sports. That’s why you play.”
So there he is, Alex Smith, a quarterback destined for stardom until his season-ending injury. He was benched, replaced and now likely to be 
traded from the San Francisco 49ers. Yet he’s still talking about his commitment to the team, and their commitment to him. He shared what really matters to succeed and win: teamwork, camaraderie and partnership.
With cloud computing still in its infancy (despite the rhetoric of a mature market and technology) the success imperative is partnership. No one vendor can save the world from investing in their own data centers and managing their own servers. The cloud requires partnership in two forms. The Xerox approach to the cloud demands gold standard technologies, plus interconnectedness among partners in industry sectors and global reach. Example: CA Technologies. Just this month, Xerox and CA Technologies planted a stake in the ground to say we can do the cloud better. And do it together.
We build on their technology sophistication. They leverage our IT services teams that deliver hundreds of offerings to all types of companies, from the largest of enterprises to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Together, we scale the cloud. We deliver it in standard Xerox fashion: quality availability, and reliability.
And what do we offer together? A reality that cloud is not the dot.com feast of past years, but a viable business model for IT excellence.
With CA Technologies, Xerox starts with application and infrastructure monitoring services, from basic to advanced. They are subscription based, and delivered directly from Xerox. Whether it is the most basic of monitoring—having visibility and assurance that your business-critical applications are available while providing an early warning signal for system performance issues, or monitoring that goes much broader and deeper, the Xerox-CA Technologies connection is akin to “cloud cover” of troops avoiding enemy planes.
Our collaboration and commitment drives cloud-based monitoring to the front door of every enterprise and SMB.
It’s about partnership, community, and teamwork.
When Ken isn’t building Xerox Business Cloud from his office in Dallas, he does like to celebrate Dallas Cowboys’ victories –which leaves him a lot of time to focus on the cloud.
