SAP is now ‘The Cloud Company powered by HANA’. Everything around us is changing rapidly with Cloud picking up its
steam. But where is the industry moving in general?
We know Cloud services are typically offered as private, public and hybrid networks. If we look at current value proposition
of cloud, it is agility and rapid innovation. Yes, you do have others like cost savings etc. but majority of the customers around the world are trying embracing cloud to bring their innovations faster to the consumers.
Let’s discuss availability of rapid innovations to customers. Doesn't it mean we will reduce the update cycles to our software applications and have more and more updates in? This means you are somehow constrained with the level of changes that you could possibly do to your software. Especially as you want benefit from the innovations, provided by the software application provider.
As the software application providers improve their processes to foster rapid innovations and are able to cater to the global business models more and more, the customizations could be reduced and more and more streamlining of application implementations. This could lead to simplification or generalization of business processes around the world. This will be the key to faster ROI and uniformity in business.
Does this mean we will see less and less of disruptive innovations? This may not be true. As even in today’s world of on premise systems we face same challenges when it comes to disruptive innovations. So possibly we will see same amount of disruptive innovations if not more.
Let’s take Facebook as an example of public cloud. Facebook which started in 2005 as a networking website for Harvard University students over the years has expanded and evolved as one of the most used social networking service in the world.
(Facebook in 2005 from Wikipedia)
(Facebook today, from facebook.com; Marc Zuckerberg - founder of facebook)
This could be an example of how innovations and new features could be distributed to the users by cloud service providers. Along the way, Facebook has started advertising as a service to generate its revenue. Also now with social networking and power of data businesses are trying to do targeted sales rather than generic promotions.
Finally with Cloud, I believe the businesses around the world are simplifying their ITs and Applications and their business processes. Also with software and systems becoming more available and affordable, the innovation could propel multifold and power of everyone and may be it could result in an era of communism in business software.
Note: What is cloud?