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

Cloud Computing - What is so disruptive about it?

I have heard varied opinions about cloud computing - ranging from we already do it, it is nothing but more virtualization, it is the next buzz word for SOA, It is just IT Services branded and sold differently to it is very disruptive enterprise IT Providers.

I am not sure I agree in 100% to any of the above generalizations. So to put some perspective, I will try to shed perspectives on "Cloud Computing", the first one today being on "What is so disruptive about it?

The other day, I was reading a book on Innovation in which there was very simple example that caught my attention and felt it may provide some context to disruption. So here it is

Most of us in America subscribe to some form of Cable/Satellite TV, the basic service has 20-30 channels, and you pay more to get more channels or movie channels and finally you have options to order specific programs and watch. This is great and Is an accepted norm.

Now what if, You called the cable company and said "I like your cable service, however I watch it sporadically, some days I do and some days I don't, and more over I want the flexibility to pick and choose what I like to watch irrespective of your current packaging structure however I would like you "Mr. Cable Company" to figure out what I watched, how long i watched and send me the bill to only that and not what i am entitled to watch. i.e Change the NORM on the Cable Company.

How do you think your cable company will react and do you think your cable company can do it ?

To me this will be very disruptive current cable providers as they have optimized their business model to delivering packages based on market segmentation in the most optimized way and to change that would be re-think all business processes and supply chain components in totally different way.

My Take ==> So If we believe "Cloud Computing" is expected to deliver true automated processes that enable on-demand consumption based IT services and not manual configuration/fixed asset based IT services, it will be disruptive to every IT Services Department/Provider who have honed this business model over the last 10-20-30 years - whether it is internal Enterprise IT or an external IT Service Provider. It is fundamently changing the accepted "NORM" of delivering Enterprise IT Services.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment on this post.

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.

Do Enterprises need any Hardware other than EDGE/End User Devices?

Recently, I posted on article titled "IT Hardware - Who is the future buyer?",

Today, I ran into this announcement from VMWARE: VMware to Manage Virtual Machines from Mobile Phones.

Though this announcement is from a specific supplier of virutualization technology, I am pretty confident this is trend in the industry.

If you carefully read and analyze the under pinning of the message, which is :- "we can reliably manage Virtual Assets from Edge/ End User Devices and virtual assets can be consumed on demand" - then we will truly have commodotized the Physical Hardware by being able to seamlessly move our virtual assets at WILL to the best value provider of physical assets dynamically ==> My Take: This announcement substantiates my assertation in the previous post in the long run !

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.