In our Meet the judges series, we’ll be chatting to some of the cloud tech experts on our judging panel to find out more about their experience, their passion for cloud tech, and what they’re making a beeline for at the awards ceremony buffet…
Tara Ridley is VP Alliances & Channels at Salesforce Australia & New Zealand.
Tara is responsible for the overall strategic direction and leadership of the Salesforce Australia and New Zealand Channels and Alliances team. She leads a dedicated team who manage relationships, align to industry and customer segments and drive the Salesforce strategy, growth and customer success initiatives with partners.
She has a twenty-five year plus track record in the IT and Communications industry in the UK and Australia, joining the Salesforce A/NZ leadership team in May 2020. Tara is a Graduate of Australian Institute of Company Directors, holds a BA (Hons) Marketing & Business and Post Graduate DipM in Marketing from the University of Huddersfield in the United Kingdom.
Tara has a keen focus on partners, customers, leadership and people and is passionate about skills, giving back to the community and driving change in all areas of diversity.
Let’s get to know Tara!
The category I was most excited about judging was the Outstanding Contribution to the Salesforce Ecosystem.
For me, it was a wonderful opportunity to see stories from our own ecosystem that are creating a real and positive impact around the world. These stories exemplify our partners’ commitment to creating change and hiring for diversity, which are key values at Salesforce.
Through their initiatives and programmes, the nominees have successfully connected with pools of new talent and empowered people with the skills to join our ecosystem, and I think these are important stories we should be telling.
Amongst many amazing stories, the work done by Deloitte Digital and Bower House Digital have been impressive. These companies were named Implementation Partner of the Year and Growth Partner of the Year in this year’s Salesforce APAC Partner of the Year awards respectively.
Through their work, we see the best of partner collaboration and innovation – how they have made outstanding contributions to the Salesforce ecosystem through top-notch customer engagement, innovative customer solutions, and exceptional focus in up-skilling and training their talent.
On a personal level, cloud solutions have been instrumental in helping myself, and everyone around me, stay connected during the pandemic lockdowns. It was also my passion for cloud-driven technology that drew me to Salesforce, and doing what I love every day. For me, in a nutshell, the best cloud technology means we can have access to data, information and conversations anytime and anywhere on any device we want. While we’re not saving lives directly like so many of the front-line medical heroes, we’ve seen several instances where cloud technology made a tremendous impact during the pandemic.
One inspiring story that comes to mind is the University of Waikato in New Zealand. When the pandemic hit, the University needed a way to bring students back to campus safely. They engaged with Salesforce partner Datacom to work on a system that would be simple and secure. Students, staff, and visitors were able to simply scan QR codes via their phones, on the way into a building, floor, or room, and their activity and close contacts were recorded in the system. The key was speed to delivery. They designed, built, tested, and deployed this solution in only four weeks!
This was something the other judges and I spoke about, and we were very much in agreement that awards like this are a springboard for organisations to get what they need to grow – be it more support, more recognition of what they do and the quality thereof, or even more investments.
It is also an important platform to tell stories about great activities by incredible businesses – to inspire current and future generations of business owners and talent and promoting how they can do good, or do better.
With every story we tell, we are reminding business owners and individuals why diversity and inclusion are so important and need to be essential considerations for businesses now. To attract top talent, a business has to walk the walk and embody diversity and inclusion in its values.
Lego building—I picked it up as a way to spend quality time with my seven-year-old son during the pandemic, and we’ve put together a number of Star Wars Lego models. My current masterpiece is Yoda!
This was something the other judges and I spoke about, and we were very much in agreement that awards like this are a springboard for organisations to get what they need to grow – be it more support, more recognition of what they do and the quality thereof, or even more investments.
It is also an important platform to tell stories about great activities by incredible businesses – to inspire current and future generations of business owners and talent and promoting how they can do good, or do better.
With every story we tell, we are reminding business owners and individuals why diversity and inclusion are so important and need to be essential considerations for businesses now. To attract top talent, a business has to walk the walk and embody diversity and inclusion in its values.
We see many opportunities for businesses in the cloud computing space. First of all, we believe the future of work will be built on connected, hybrid experiences. The workplace has rapidly evolved, and with it, employee expectations—forcing organisations to deliver digital‐first and connected experiences to drive productivity and retain talent. Agility will also become key as the pressure to innovate faster continues to rise. Businesses will be increasingly driven to composable and event-driven architecture.
Hyperautomation is another trend we are expecting as businesses undergo digital transformation, that will unlock productivity, accelerate time‐to‐market, and transform employee and customer experiences.
Some of the other challenges we foresee are to do with security, dealing with the complexity that comes with digital-driven operations across multiple platforms, and access to the massive amounts of data businesses need to handle. Security‐by‐default will become a need‐to‐have as organisations increasingly realise their applications and automations are only as secure as the composable blocks on which they are built. The rise of hybrid, distributed ecosystems also adds complexity. As the digital world embraces hybrid and multi‐clouds, finding a universal way of integrating and managing these environments will become essential to successful digital transformation.
And finally, a single source of truth will becomes key to data‐driven businesses—As digitisation continues to drive an increasing amount of data, organisations will seek a single source of truth where consumers can get the right data in the right context at the right time.
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