
Another day, another niche industry moves to the cloud. If not, software is being built for these niches. Webcor, a San Francisco based construction business, has confirmed their decision to store data in the cloud. This comes as somewhat of a surprise given the generally slow pace of the construction business of venturing into new fields. Many companies rely on their own custom built platforms when it comes to data management and storage, and the construction industry is no different. These in house platforms are typically costly and make it extremely difficult to partner with other companies.
Vince Sarubbi, CTO of Webcor, explains in a video interview with Forbes that moving to new technology and cloud services helps his business in a variety of ways. “The construction business alone is unique and every general contractor that’s in the business is unique. Because of that over the last 10-20 years we’ve built our own applications and now we’re taking our software projects we’ve had over the last 20 years and taking those that are not strategic to us and pushing those out into the cloud or out to outside services. The big piece for us is that we don’t have to worry about costs, I don’t have to worry about having staff, I don’t have to worry about having data centers. But the biggest piece is that we can now focus on strategic projects.”
Webcor started working with Box for their initial deployment, a company in the cloud market. It is here they learned that cloud storage solves many of their problems internally. It also had them embracing the cloud service concept without realizing it.
Mr. Sarubbi continued to explain that moving to the cloud will help efficiency remarkably as workers can view plans and architectural drawings on iPad tablets via a new construction application called PlanGrid.
Just another winning day for the cloud industry.