The world is moving at lightning speed today. People used to talk about doing business at the speed of the Internet and it’s clear we are already there. Change is the only constant, which has been attributed to Heraclitus, Isaac Asimov and others, is the only thing we can rely on.
Just look around at the world of business, academia and government. Everyday new products, services and ideas are emerging. Customer loyalties are shifting as frequently as the tides. Companies that were thriving a few short years ago, may be gone or struggling today.
Look at what’s happened to book stores. Borders declared bankruptcy and a lot of the smaller ones have closed. People are buying ebooks, listening to audio books or buying physical books from Amazon. When is the last time you went to a travel agent? Most people go online to Expedia, Orbitz or Priceline to book travel. How about using a traditional stock broker? We still use the post office, but email has replaced a lot of our correspondence – and more of it is in the cloud than ever before.
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I just finished reading a book where the entire operations of a financial company are digital. “The Fear Index” by Robert Harris is a thriller that combines the world of hedge funds with an algorithmic trading program that becomes autonomous. The financial company uses no paper in its operations. In fact no paper products or anything related to them are allowed in the offices.
There are no magazines or newspapers in the reception area. It is company policy that as far as possible, no printed material or writing paper of any sort should pass the threshold. They came up with a clever incentive to ensure this. Each employee is required to pay a fine of 10 Swiss francs each time they were caught in possession of ink and wood pulp rather than silicon and plastic. Violators would have their names posted on the company intranet.
It’s amazing how effective this was in changing behavior. They also realized that they couldn’t control if their visitors carried paper, but it was very evident from the lack of paper in the office, that it was frowned upon.
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One of the most interesting things about software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing in general is that many offerings are trying to simplify people’s lives. They are taking the complexity out of something and making it easier for you to focus on your business.
If I want to build a SaaS application today, I would most likely use the Amazon or Microsoft cloud for my platform (or pick your favorite provider). I purchase virtual computing time and storage and run my application. They have made it easy for me to get up and running. I don’t have to find and buy a server, install an operating system, configure it and then worry about maintaining it. Someone else worries about all that.
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Imagine if the Founding Fathers of the United States had iPads when they were signing the Declaration of Independence or The US Constitution. Rather than pulling out a big quill pen and dipping it in ink, each delegate could have walked up to the desk and signed the document with their finger. In fact, they could have passed the iPad around to each other for signing rather than all walking up to the document. That would have helped Ben Franklin, since he had gout and it was tough for him to stand up and walk.
If John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson used DocuSign Ink to sign an electronic version of The Declaration of Independence, not only would the iPad have captured their signature, but it would have put a time and date stamp along with the GPS coordinates of where they signed. All of that information, including the document, would go to a secure storage area in the cloud and be retained.
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According to IDC, 80% of new commercial enterprise applications will be deployed on cloud platforms in 2012. Add to that the expectation that intelligent mobile devices will exceed “traditional computing” devices by almost 2 to 1 within the next 24 months and you have a very different world from just a few years ago.
Cloud computing is very hot and every major software, hardware and technology services company is trying to get into it. In some cases, vendors are throwing a web front end onto an application and calling it a cloud service. Many others are creating infrastructure for companies to run their own applications in the cloud or are providing complete business systems.
I was talking to a customer this week and the CIO said they are moving as much as they can to the cloud. Some will be public and some of it private. He said that a vendor would have a hard time getting a traditional server-based product in the door today. They don’t want to buy anymore servers, capitalize them and go through a chargeback allocation process.
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