How Cloud Computing Became a Second-Century Priority at Thomas Publishing

As it has for many middle-market firms, the uncertain economy has made Thomas Publishing of New York City ever savvier when it comes to leveraging technology to reduce costs. These reductions don’t always require the elimination of jobs — or at least they didn’t when Thomas Publishing recently zeroed in on its hiring expenses. The firm credits social media with helping to lower its hiring costs by 30 percent over the past 2 years.

“For one thing, we don’t use as many recruiters anymore. Linkedin is now our recruiting department, and we can now search by company and job skill for the exact employee we want. And then we reach out to them directly,” says Thomas Publishing CFO Mitch Peipert, who describes Linkedin as one of a number of online solutions that the firm has put to smart use in recent years. Apparently more are yet to come, as the 114-year-old firm prepares to wade into the less-charted world of cloud computing.

“I think you’ll find that there are a lot of middle-market companies like this one that due to the uncertain economy held back investment in tech development and moving to newer models like the cloud. But now that we have done all of our cost-cutting, we have to reinvest in the company,” observes Peipert, who is quick to point out that Thomas Publishing had already crossed what might be considered a more sizable technology chasm when it brought its widely used Thomas Registry online.

At the same time, Thomas stopped publishing its printed registry, the signature “big green book” volumes that the firm published from early in the last century.

“Every manufacturer and every industrial company would buy a set of these books every year for the first 100 years of this company. So the Internet really disrupted that model, and I would say that today something like 95 percent of our revenue is derived from digital products,” says Peipert, who recently viewed the company’s September 30 financial year-end more as a kickoff for a number of future online initiatives designed to help Thomas begin to realize the economic advantages inherent in cloud computing.

“There’s a lot of talk about cloud computing in the middle market, but according to other executives and CFOs with whom I speak, there has not been a lot of adoption just yet. People are certainly exploring it, learning the possible paths to adoption, but they have remained somewhat afraid to fully invest. I’ve been conferring with our CTO, and the advantages have become clear to both of us,” explains Peipert, whose focus on technology enablement grew exponentially after the company’s board agreed 2 years ago to add the firm’s CTO to Peipert’s list of direct reports.

“I put in a mandate that all new IT projects had to demonstrate a clear ROI — so I kind of have to follow my own rules here. So far, luckily, the board has approved all of these projects based on the analyses that we did for them,” says Peipert, who characterizes the firm’s advancement into the cloud computing environment as a top priority for 2013.

Peipert believes that part of the value derived from using cloud computing will come from the availability of applications to a dispersed workforce.

“This is also going to allow us to work virtually. We have a lot of space in Midtown and it’s quite expensive, so we expect that we’ll have some flexibility in work hours and maybe some shared office space going forward, enabled by these new systems,” he predicts.