Investments in cloud computing continue to accelerate as vendors add capabilities to differentiate themselves. Offerings in the forms of Software as a Service (SAAS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and Private Cloud appliances are rapidly entering the market. My innovation team has been working with enterprise customers for over four years creating some of the initial architectures and hybrid solutions blending legacy and cloud services. We are seeing solution development times rapidly decreasing. Major enterprises are spinning up new business models and bringing them to market in record time. Though this, we are seeing higher ROI and lower TCO. Technical departments are discovering that the skill sets of their personnel rapidly adapt to the new development architectures and really their depth of experience in enterprise security, integration, and orchestration of complex business processes fall into familiar patterns, but now accelerated by building blocks being provided as services. The ability for IT to adapt to the cloud was never really in question and is proving to be a shift they are readily capable of making.
What is of higher interest is the effect it is having on the business and creation of new business models. As speed to market increases, so does the speed of competition. The scale, reach, and cost of cloud computing is open new doors for business to experiment in new offerings and reach new markets. We are seeing some bold moves in each vertical where new offerings and channels to consumers are creating a pattern of disruptive innovation that is game changing to the current status quo of leadership in a given market. Business are having to rapidly consider the effects that the competitors have having in emerging markets.
Some areas of consideration that many of projects are encountering:
- Creating digital channels around mobile phones and slate devices has been a primary initiative for many consumer brands over the past year. The channels are being more holistically created in terms of an enterprise capability vs. an application. The idea being that you will continuously increase and evolve the channel to meet consumer needs.
- The channels support social commerce. Meaning they have integrated abilities of both online eCommerce and deep social media integration. Analytics, consumer profiling, and 1:1 personalization are built as core enterprise components under all offerings creating an aggregation of data across all offerings provided and across all channels.
- Large investments in quality content, expert content, and brand participation in the social verse is creating a gravity around the new channels to draw the target demographic directly to the enterprise channels. Integration with the social sites helps in the broadcast and awareness, but also gathers analytics from those sites as well. Over time, successful enterprise draw the community to their channels and ever increase the value of the channel to themselves and potential partners.
- Those enterprises that have secured new digital channels and communities are now being approached by B2B partners and even competitors who need to reach these audiences. Embracing partners and even competitors offerings only increases the effect of making a premier channel and providing your company with a larger scope of the industries analytics and XRM intelligence of consumers, partners, and the competition.
- Having broader and more insightful analytics gives you another major asset in learning what the next round of consumer needs to be met and new services around industry analytics can be spun up to generate new sources of revenue.
- All of the above is encourage companies to adopt more of a start-up mindset. The goal being to devise new business models and get them to market fast in test markets to gather learnings and establish the initial channels. The willingness to learn and adapt to the markets.
- The best architectures combine building blocks from SaaS and PaaS models. Create your own innovation platform of enterprise core capabilities with these building blocks, but do so with a vision that you will be reusing them across many of the businesses and aggregating the analytics underneath.
- The cloud can scale to meet the infrastructure growth of new business. Can your organizational processes, social media involvement, and B2B partners scale to the same level?
- Invite test markets to vet out your new offerings and processes. Learn to listen and empower the consumer to tune your business
- Global reach is only as far as your providers cloud can provide service.
Cloud reach is ever increasing:. The Windows Azure platform is now commercially available in the following 41 countries:
Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, United States, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, and Trinidad and Tobago…
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