Cloud Computing - Why should Enterprises Care?

Recently, I wrote a blog entry analyzing the results and what they mean - in most cases I concluded that most executives were more confidant on controlling costs than they were on growth. Links to the post: http://kunamneni.blogspot.com/2009/07/ramblings-on-economy-is-it-all-good-now.html.

This brings attention to why are the executives not confidant on growth. Innovation is key to growth, and every executive is talking about it however their immediate actions are related to cost cutting. There may be many reasons; one reason that is probably obvious is that they are not confidant bringing their investments in Innovation fast enough to the market or another reason could be that they try too few ideas and cannot reliably predict the impact on revenue due to high risk that failure of any single idea may cause deviation that will not be accepted by the markets

This then truly raises the question, is the company’s innovation process scalable and whether the costs of scaling innovation process is truly linear to number of Ideas being pursued. Should every organization not take a closer look at their “Process of Innovation” as their future may very well depend on efficiency of the “Innovation Engine”. In simple terms - if a company typically tries 5 - 10 ideas at any time, then it is probably time to ask the question - how can the company scale this 10 fold - without increasing costs linearly, decreasing quality of product and at the same time improving time to market (bringing ideas to market faster).

So what is the answer from my vantage point:- (My take)

If we assume that today’s enterprises rely heavily on technology and analytics to foster innovation; then cloud computing has the potential to provide solution to scaling of the Enterprises "Innovation processes".

Cloud computing promises to lower Innovation costs by

1. Eliminating Upfront Investment Costs by allowing “Pay for Use” and thereby avoiding the lengthy, costly and cumbersome CAPEX processes.


2. Eliminating the need to plan complex deployment processes, by inducing highly efficient scaling and provisioning processes


3. Standardizing the Management Framework to enable complete visibility to all business processes.

In summary, if the future growth of your enterprise is based on engine of rapid innovation, then it is time to analyze the innovation process and how to scale it to try new ideas in a highly efficient manner.

Thank you your for taking the time to read. Your opinions and comments are welcome.

Thanks

Nagesh
The views represented in this blog are my personal views and are not a "reflection of" or "opinions of" any of the institutions I am associated with or have worked for