cloud business flexibility
Opportunity is Knocking
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BuzzBy John McEleney
This past week, several members of our senior management team attended a variety of cloud conferences. It is really exciting to see the amount of activity that is happening in our industry: widespread discussion of the hybrid cloud model, new customer use cases, technology developments, partner agreements, new service offerings… if I had to summarize in one word what I am observing, it would be: Opportunity.
This opportunity is happening because we are undergoing a huge platform shift. These shifts happen very infrequently, however when they do, they create ripple effects that are significant. Seemingly overnight customers can get new levels of performance, cost benefit, business flexibility or entirely new solutions that were not possible with the previous paradigm.
But this shift will not be an opportunity for everyone. It will only be for those that embrace it aggressively and take advantage of what is possible today that was not possible yesterday. This applies equally to customers, service providers and vendors. Those that simply want to “hang on” to what was possible yesterday do so at their own peril.
What I observed at some of the events I participated in was the familiar denial of the “old guard.” I am not just speaking about installed vendors, but also to the customers who are erecting barriers to the new technology. Many of these barriers are real and are rooted in genuine technology and business concerns, but just as often, they’re reflections of the organization’s short-term vision and inability to see the upside potential of the cloud.
A recent thoughtful blog posting about channels and the cloud by Tim Harmon of Forrester research really resonated with me on some similar themes. Tim argues for vendors to re-think their channel programs to attack the cloud opportunity:
Now, not all channel companies are going to be able to make that transformation…But there are going to be many that will try and fail, ultimately resulting in a 12%-15% channel company washout. So think about it – supply (the number of channel companies) goes down; demand (for channel partner assets) remains high. It’s those tech vendors that amp their channel game to enable their partners’ cloud aspirations that are going to come away as the new “channel chiefs.”
For those people that want to just “hang on” to existing technologies and business models, perhaps it’s worth considering what the great football coach Vince Lombardi said: “The best defense is a good offense.” This is as true in computing as it is in football.
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