From contest to context: now that cloud has won
- Summary:
- “Cloud?” is no longer a question: rather, “cloud!” has become the new context, in which every institution of society and commerce is asking how it must re-invent its mission. Vertical focus takes the spotlight as global connection becomes the norm.
Just as clearly, the shift away from ever-more-powerful machines on isolated desktops was signaled when PC became a Web-only title after January 2009; in that same year, the United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology published the first draft of “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing.”
Curves of capability and cost had crossed: henceforth, the most cost-effective venue for IT effort would increasingly be a mega-scale service provider’s hub, rather than a desktop PC or even a corporate data center.
Five years later, even IT’s most venerable legacy incumbents seek the gaudiest flag of “cloud” in which to wrap themselves – while newer companies, “born cloudy,” churn out year-on-year growth rates of 30+ per cent even as their revenues soar to multi-billions of US dollars.
Put simply, “cloud?” is no longer a question: rather, “cloud!” has become the new context, in which every institution of society and commerce is asking how it must re-invent its mission.
This is a right-angle rotation from the horizontal spread of a new technology model to the vertical penetration of new ways of doing business. We see this clearly in sectors such as automobiles, health care, financial services and the public sector – to mention only four of the six verticals identified by us in our formation of a new Industries Business Unit headed by former United States CIO Vivek Kundra.
See also: You'll get the cloud you ask for. So ask wisely!
Jul 11 2013diginomica.com
Consider the manner in which ubiquitous connection, elastic capacity, and social collaboration among individuals are transforming these verticals. In automotive, for example, a bedrock assumption of business practice is that the automobile dealer buys the vehicles wholesale from the manufacturer and sells them at retail to owner/drivers; consequently, that it is the dealer who “owns” the understanding of the ultimate purchaser that makes the dealer the steward of the brand.
What happens when connected cars, measuring driver behavior and reporting that information to the auto maker, make the manufacturer by far the more knowledgeable party? The entire balance of power in the industry is being changed. Merely replacing a conventional dealer management system with a cloud-delivered modernization will not equip the dealer to be relevant in this new environment.
Consider financial services. Not that long ago, Will Smith’s movie The Pursuit of Happyness could accurately depict a young stockbroker chasing the brass ring of a relationship with a corporate pension-fund manager. Secure that “gatekeeper” as a customer, and the business of thousands of employees came with it.
Today, defined-contribution retirement plans increasingly dominate: IRA and 401(k) plans in the United States, and “DC” plans in the UK that now outnumber “DB” plans by eight to one. In this world, every individual employee becomes to some degree his or her own pension manager, making it necessary to deliver content and transactional services for use across a far more diverse spectrum of needs and knowledge. Again, replacing the mechanisms of traditional pension planning with cloudy successors will not even scratch the surface of the required transformations.
See also: “The cloud” is the place for the customer cyberspace
Mar 6 2014diginomica.com
None of the conversations that are taking on these industry upheavals can spare the time for a religious war over cloud versus on-premise technology. That war is, simply, over. Whenever anyone tries to draw a line and say, “Nothing on that side of this boundary will ever be done in the cloud,” that line had better be drawn in pencil.
For example, one used to hear assertions that high-performance scientific computing would always be done most cost-effectively on throughput-optimized “vector processor” machines such as those pioneered by Cray Research. Only years later, though, people were reporting that it was absolutely worth the effort to rewrite their code (or use growing catalogs of tools for automatic parallelization) to enable high-performance computing on cloud clusters at plummeting cost.
In more everyday situations, ERP was once considered the canonical example of systems that would never be cloudy. In 2008, an article could be entitled “ERP too complex for SaaS” without being derided as narrow-minded – but this year, Gartner analysts declared that by 2016 “it will be common to refer to [on-premise ERP systems] as ‘legacy’ software.”
These transitions make it clear that today, discussion of “cloud computing” should be about as common as discussion of “electrification” in the halls of the modern enterprise. The questions of greatest import are now of the form, “Given the connection of the customer; given the massive scalability of processing power; given the immense agility that comes with orchestrating services rather than standing up stacks of hardware and software; given this context, what must our business define itself to be?”
Those who courageously open the boundaries of that discussion will find the most promising (though admittedly, often uncomfortable) path to future success. Better that than the more comfortable path to irrelevance.