BITSoftware / Blog

As I said in an earlier post about ERP Prediction for 2012, this year cloud-based ERP will continue to gain ground at the expense of traditional ERP. Why? Because enterprises will continue to adopt SaaS-based applications to replace legacy, high-maintenance and often marginally effective systems in use today.

What managers do not know about cloud is that behind the well-known benefits – cost savings and operations improvements -, there are also some benefits that can potentially change the game for many companies that are willing to be very proactive in managing potential downside. Those are the things I wanna talk about.

Easier change management of infrastructure including maintenance and upgrades

The use of cloud solutions allows companies to improve the agility to deploy solutions and choice between vendors, especially when cloud interoperability will become a reality. Or, at least, more than it is today. Cloud computing also offers an online ramp to new non-relational databases, new languages, and frameworks that are designed to encourage scalability and take advantage of new innovations.

Cloud computing holds the potential to dramatically change the businesses that adopt it

There are some opportunity windows not to be missed. For example, cloud computing lets companies to create a new generation of products and services, significantly less expensive or more profitable than the competition. You will no longer need to purchase prohibitive amounts of computing power or radically new business models in order to improve your data storage or processing power, because cloud computing makes these opportunities unusually accessible.

More tolerance for innovation and experimentation from businesses.

With fewer technical and economic barriers to creating new ways to improve the business, cloud computing will enable prototyping and market validation of new approaches much faster and less expensively than before.

In the short term, for many organizations the apparent potential of the individual changes above will often not be sufficient to them to make the transition to cloud computing. Longer term, cloud computing is increasingly appearing to be a transformative change in the business landscape. It`s up to you if you want to be one step ahead of your competitors, or prefer to stay in the squad. Because adopting cloud solutions will give you an important advantage to compete in the modern business environment.

Sources: Forrester Research, Gartner, ZD Net Consulting

Cloud computing has disrupted the venture capital industry in a big way. One of the changes can be observed is the reduction of capital expenditures required to start a new business. Where before you needed expensive servers and an army of people to maintain them, now you can call to Amazon Cloud and the problem resolved without fuss.

Over-capacity of a cloud, while an underestimation of the cost to people, may seem a bit misplaced for many conservative type managers. But the trend, globaly, is to migrate to the cloud, and not to your own servers. And, from this perspective, the financial benefits are not insignificant. And, after all, the essential role of a manager is to lower costs and increase profits.

Cloud computing is not a new technology

Kevin Jackson, director of Cloud Services at NJVC, an information technology (IT) solutions provider supporting the federal government and the United States Department of Defense founded in 2000, said in one of interviews with Robert Duffner that „the first misconception is that cloud computing is a new technology”. „In my mind – he said -, cloud represents an evolution of technology that combines things like virtualization, SOA, mobile technology, and mobile infrastructures. It blends them together into a new model for consuming and delivering information technology.” From his point of view, cloud computing is more a business model, an approach, and a technique than it is a technology. And the first thing that’s important to understand is that cloud computing is not new technology, but rather using and leveraging existing technology in novel ways. „This is an inevitable transition that I sometimes liken to the industrial revolution. There, society went from an environment where products were handmade in cottages to assembly lines powered by the steam engine. That was a revolution not just in society but in the economy and many, many different domains. What we’re seeing with cloud computing is the exact same thing, except it’s for information technology. It’s the next step in the information revolution”, he said.

The future is the cloud’s business

David W. Cearley, Research Vice President and Gartner Fellow, said recently, on his research „Cloud computing key initiative overview: „Enterprises that use public cloud services can potentially save money by leveraging a provider’s elastically scalable, variably priced environment. However, public cloud computing also raises concerns about security, data management, trust, control and performance.” In his opinion, few enterprises will abandon on-premises models, but most will move toward private cloud computing models.
Kevin Jackson believe that in the delivery of IT systems, we’re going to be transitioning from system integrators to service integrators, and these services are going to be delivered by multiple clouds: private clouds, public clouds, community clouds, and, may be, industry clouds.

„You will have services that are designed and optimized for specific verticals, and an information technology provider would need to understand not only what its customer needs are, but what services they will have to integrate in order to support all of their customers’ needs”, said the director of Cloud Services at NJVC.
Most of those involved in the phenomenon of cloud computing considered that the next three years are crucial in the development of cloud computing, and the biggest problem will not be the softwares but the reluctance of companies, which should be convinced that the future is the cloud’s business.

What is, after all, the cloud computing?

Cloud computing – with the significance of “Internet computing” – is a modern concept in the field of computers and informatics. Cloud computing requires an immense and complex network of servers, which will provide users with both storage and computing power and programs with normal Web browsing devices. This way, costly investments in equipment and IT staff will be eliminated. Cloud computing allows companies to achieve tremendous computing power via Internet, without being forced to invest in infrastructure.

The optimum circumstances for deploying cloud computing

In view of the Gartner`s specialists, Cloud computing is a complex and rapidly evolving concept. To reduce confusion and focus enterprise efforts, consider these points before beginning an investigation:
1. Understand how cloud computing is defined, and how it will evolve. This will enable you to understand when, where, how and why enterprises should exploit public cloud computing services. It will also help you understand the optimum circumstances for deploying cloud computing.
2. Evaluate which cloud-computing models, architectures, technologies and best practices to adopt to implement private cloud computing services.
3. Analyze how cloud computing will affect the strategy and direction of IT and your business.
4. Analyze which vendors, markets and industries the cloud-computing phenomenon will transform.
5. Make a choice.