We’ve arrived at another inflection point for enterprise software, and the future is bright (and mobile).
Looking back at the past, a period of significant growth followed game-changing developments adopted by the corporate community. Against the backdrop of the worst economic downturn in modern history, this is the case beginning effectively now.
A buzzword soup of terms — SOA, SaaS, WS — is materializing into a tangible offering — cloud computing. Startups get it. Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Google get it. Big business is getting it.
IBM announced further developments in their Blue Cloud initiative here and here. Oracle’s portal demonstrates that they are aggressively pursuing cloud computing via both the storage and software models.
The drivers of moving to the cloud are:
- Increased outsourcing and specialization leading to an overall reduction in-house IT spending
- Explosion of data-intensive applications and the increasing demand for metrics and business intelligence (BI)
- Increased enterprise comfort-level with outside vendors and data services
- Advancement and adoption of grid computing, web services / SOA, virtualization
- Increasing demand for the mobile enterprise
Corporate IT has already embraced outsourcing and virtualization, so it makes sense to take the next logical step towards specialization — cloud computing. Free yourself of managing zero value-add IT infrastructure and focus on your core business by leveraging services like AWS/EC2 to achieve pure business goals. Worrying about server requisitioning, provisioning, configuring software, and bandwidth is simply a complex and unnecessary distraction.
Moving to the cloud enables quick ramp-up and ramp-down utilization of what would typically take significant man-hours to do internally. Quick provisioning of servers, web servers, applications, application servers; pay for what you use during the lifetime of a project; no capitalized infrastructure; shut it all down when the project runs it’s useful lifespan is what it is and will be all about.
Enterprise adoption tends to trend at about a 2-3 year lag from introduction, so we’re starting to see the first wave of real cloud computing adoption, and expect to see full adoption beginning in 2010 through 2011.
What does this mean for mobility?
With the adoption of both public and private clouds by the enterprise, this will free up capital for enterprise mobility projects and also enable them by easing data access outside the four walls. As IT infrastructure costs decrease by efficient use and specialization — cloudsourcing — of applications, this money can be plowed into mobility projects to really take advantage of distributed data access, further reducing the cost of doing business.
Mobilizing your field workers and freeing your desk workers delivers increased business transaction economy from sales, manufacturing, and delivery to billing, maintenance, and reporting. Total integration to the enterprise via mobile devices and applications — far beyond the current contacts, email, phone applications of today will further drive enterprise cloud adoption (which will in turn fuel more mobile adoption).
The exciting enterprise inflection point we’re living through today signals a fundamental change to the way business will be conducted. The rise of cloud computing and mobility will match the internal and external expectations of your staff and customers.
I’ll be laying out the best practices here to identify your key applications to mobilize and strategies to ensure successful rollout and adoption.
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