By Adebayo Sanni
The drive for improved agility and more rapid deployment of services is a main concern for business leaders across virtually all industry sectors. For their part, IT decision-makers are under increased pressure to make sure business solutions can deliver on these ambitions. In its latest “Business Value Scorecard”, Forrester found that business leaders increasingly measure success by comparing what percentage of their IT-spend actually fuels innovation to how much just helps “keep the lights on”.
This view of success is undoubtedly a large driver behind the rapid rise of cloud computing in the past few years, and why the technology has today joined the enterprise’s formal IT portfolio. In its many forms, the technology offers businesses a gateway to improved agility. To add to this, vendors’ cloud offerings today have at once become more varied and more granular, which means discerning companies can pick and choose exactly from a large menu of business solutions to suit their needs.
The public cloud, in particular, has become popular with businesses seeking a cost-effective means to reduce their time-to-market for new services or quickly deliver crucial add-ons to customers using their existing offerings. With customer satisfaction scores now serving as a measure of success for IT initiatives[1], it’s hardly surprising that the market for Software-as-Service (SaaS) cloud solutions is set to expand by 17 per cent each year up to 2018.
The public cloud has already earned a reputation as an enabler of service agility in a number of fields, with the healthcare industry serving as a prime example of this. According to a recent survey, 67 per cent of healthcare institutions use SaaS cloud-based applications. What’s just as notable, however, is what these organisations expect from the cloud. Forty-five per cent of respondents cited “speed to deploy new services” as a top measure of the cloud’s value to their business[2]. This fell only slightly behind the top measure – “improving technological capabilities” – which is of course the central purpose of any technology investment.
SaaS cloud solutions area also leading the pack in this regard by helping mid-sized businesses and expansion-oriented larger companies gain agility in the pursuit of their growth ambitions. As they become more successful, businesses will need to build on the breadth and functionality of their IT systems. SaaS applications allow organisations to very quickly make scale-appropriate upgrades and implement expansion packages developed specifically for their needs. As a result, they can make the jump to the “next level” without the high costs and growing pains that have traditionally accompanied these expansions.
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Of course, companies will continue to consume the cloud in different ways depending on their needs. For example, while many financial institutions and government bodies do make wide use of SaaS, others may have specific requirements that make an in-house cloud platform more appropriate for some applications.
That being said, business agility takes many forms. By taking advantage of the variety of cloud platforms available to them today, companies can actually gain a great deal of flexibility when launching new services. Because SaaS applications from established vendors are built on the same heritage and technologies as those traditionally developed for in-house IT systems, companies can seamlessly transition between a public and private structure as they see fit. Business leaders eager to launch new services quickly to stay ahead of the market can roll these out in the cloud in a matter of weeks, and then move them in-house if they want to keep valuable data or processes out of the public domain down the line.
The truth is that the debate over which cloud platform – SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or one of the many other options available – is creating a lot of noise but has in fact become a moot point. Ultimately, business leaders will make intelligent investment decisions as they always have – first determining what pain points they want to address and then choosing whichever cloud platform and add-on services they need to address these challenges.
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For example, many businesses have already begun to create their own mobile applications to empower employees to work more collaboratively and productively using their connected devices. Applications developers need the proper tools and resource libraries to build this software, and will fuel rising demand for Platform-as-a-Service cloud solutions in the coming years.
No matter what they want to achieve with the cloud, what IT leaders will notice is that the breadth and customisation options offered by vendors today present them with a seemingly unlimited range of options to choose from. With the level of flexibility and extensibility available to them, it will be up to business leaders to choose the most suitable cloud platform for their needs, and build on their investment by developing services and add-ons that will set them apart and help them remain agile no matter what the market throws their way.
Sanni is the country managing director of Oracle Nigeria
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