I get a lot of PR pitches that don't really ring my bell. We write about strategy, not vendors...but sometimes a flack offers me a CIO, and those calls I usually take. I'm clear with both the PR rep and the CIO that I feel no obligation to mention the product or vendor, but I'm not averse to doing so if it seems useful to our readers. So, anyway, I spoke yesterday with Bill Hoban, CIO of Extra Space Storage, the second-largest operator of self-storage facilities in the US, about the company's embrace of cloud computing.

Extra Space has 685 facilities and almost 400,000 customers spread across country, so applications that run anywhere across the net make sense. Hoban was tasked with bringing an outsourced call-center operations in house, but decided he didn't want the overhead and headaches involved.

The company already ran its Point of Sale system on the ASP model. When Hoban chose SalesForce.com, he was able to import some six million customer records to the CRM service with integration tools from Cast Iron Systems. That job took about three weeks from proof of concept to being fully operational.

ESS maintains a number of legacy databases, which Cast Iron makes available to the cloud applications. It all looks the same to the user, says Hoban. The company still hosts its primary accounting package from Great Plains at its Salt Lake City headquarters. While Hoban has no specific plan to stop hosting Great Plains, he is drawing up a strategic plan that considers moving all apps to cloud. "We'll do the financial analysis, and go with what makes sense to have other people host," he says.

Hoban, who reports to the CFO, says senior management is concerned about the economy, even though self-storage companies tend to weather downturns fairly well. His job has been to focus on G&A expenses. To that end he has decreased the time needed to close the books at the end of each quarter from 20 days to eight days, and increased the frequency of downloads from the POS system and other systems to Great Plains, which allows fewer accountants to handle more accounts. Consolidation of data in real time also allows helps the company make investment decisions at a moment when, as Hoban says, "cash is king."

I asked Hoban how his job has changed as CIO of a mostly-cloudy company. "My life has changed quite a bit over the course of the last year," he said. "I'm fortunate to be able to approach things strategically. Our president has given me the charter to study ways to become more effective, and my day involves a lot of research. I spend much less time sitting in meetings about applications development, and more time in the field seeing what's going on." A recent swing to big markets on the east coast, where he joined conversations with analysts, "never would have happened before." The CIO role is expanding, he says, and he finds himself "touching all the components of company."

CIOs in all industries, he says, need to pull themselves out of the daily grind of IT management and look across the enterprise. "At times I feel like I've removed myself from the IT department -- I have to walk through the department to remind myself."