Mortgage Choice's clever cloud call

When broker group Mortgage Choice decided to deploy Google Apps across its business in 2009 it made for plenty of upbeat headlines.

But it didn't take long for the naysayers to emerge, says Mortgage Choice general manager of operations Neill Rose-Innes.

“I had one franchisee in Victoria who came to me at the state conference and said: ‘Just so you know, this decision to go Google Apps is the worst decision that Mortgage Choice has ever made',” he says.

“When we first rolled it out there was mixed views – they didn't like what they had but they didn't like what we were giving them. It was a typical user reaction to change.”

Two years on, Mortgage Choice has few regrets, and any hesitation it may have had about embracing cloud computing has been replaced with hope for what will come with the next wave of cloud applications.

“The same franchisee a year later came to me and said: ‘I now understand why you made the decision to go down that path,' because of all the benefits that are derived from that sort of delivery model,” says Rose-Innes.

Mortgage Choice has now taken its love for cloud computing even further with the deployment of a Google Docs cloud data security application called CloudLock Vault, and the development of an application platform for franchisees.

The vault presented impressive costs savings, says Rose-Innes, with the proprietary solution it had been investigating expected to cost at least $140,000 a year.

“We got a better outcome for $12,000 a year through leveraging the Google Apps ecology.”

Meanwhile, the applications it's now making available to franchisees are proving to be great efficiency drivers. “It perfectly fits our business model,” says Rose-Innes. “We don't have staff that we can dictate to, our franchisees are our clients that we need to influence.”

For its franchisees, composed of a group of businesses of varying sizes, Mortgage Choice has built an internal app store of mobile and cloud-based tools.

Private app store model

Gartner predicts by 2015 private app stores will be deployed by 60 per cent of all organisations.

This model is emerging as IT departments shift from being technology suppliers and maintainers to supporting improved data flow and enabling more third-party applications.

It's a role change required to keep up with the growing technology demands of internal clients. In the words of Gartner analyst John Roberts: “Customer demands will change faster than your architectures”.

The Mortgage Choice App Central platform means businesses with different requirements and different tools already in place can pick and choose from a range of cloud based services.

“We're actually enabling individual businesses to pick up tools that they can use in their business at their own time and cost and place,” says Rose-Innes.

As a result, he says the franchisees are less reliant on his team in terms of waiting for it to provision tools that help them in their business.

Mortgage Choice's broader move to cloud computing has also ensured the business has assessed the risks on behalf of franchisees.

“We did our due diligence of the Google Apps platform, how they secure it,...the contractual requirements, ownership and title over data, ability to extract the data from their environment should we choose to end the relationship, and all of that was catered for somewhere in the agreement,” says Rose-Innes.

“There's a danger at the moment with a lot of cloud solutions that are offered on the internet at the consumer level. Most people go into them without looking at that level of detail, including small businesses.

“One of the most important things to look at is how do you exit out of there, who has rights to the data they store on your behalf, and is it expressly clear that you own it.”