What I detest most about recessions is when firms put all their focus on short-term cost-reduction measures and take their eye off the ball with initiatives that can reap much more lucrative efficiencies over a longer period. I am somewhat hopeful this recession is a little different: shaving a few percentage points off the bottom-line is unlikely to make a huge difference when your very survival is at stake, and several companies are exploring more radical, longer-term strategies that will lift them above the depressed morass. Moreover, many smart executives are seeking to tie themselves to longer-term projects that give them added job security and enhance their own roles in changing times.
Cloud computing has all the attributes and potential to support a global outsourcing environment with lower infrastructure costs, lower energy costs from eliminating hardware boxes, and much better scaleability to provide computing resources to meet demand in an unpredictable global market. My view is that we are in a global delivery continuum, where many organizations will originally evolve from crude BPO environments (a lot of lift and shift), explore SaaS delivery to optimize that environment, and ultimately dabble with SaaS apps that be deployed in a Cloud "plug-in" model. A flashy diagram will likely ensue, but that's the nuts-and-bolts of how this continuum will eventually play out. Bottom-line, those service providers which persist in a labor-arbitrage-only service model and ignore the benefits and cost-efficiencies of SaaS and Cloud, will get left behind.
"I just knew the mainframe would make a comeback", said an excited industry veteran on Cloud computing recently. He's actually right, but the difference in today's world, is we are creating the applications and the development environment to run real business applications in a cloud environment.
We're not there yet, but smart organizations need to start exploring service provider relationships where Cloud is on the horizon. Cloud computing is not only rapidly emerging as an infrastructure option that is relatively inexpensive; it is also becoming a buyers' market.
Cloud has come a long way since being a small blip on the radar in 2007 when the likes of Microsoft, HP, Google
Recent Comments