The Cloud’s Game-Changer is Competitive Advantage
Like many technologies, the real value of cloud lies not in the technology itself but in the operational changes it enables.
Here are just a few ways that businesses can use the cloud to achieve competitive advantage:
- IT staff can be freed from routine maintenance to focus on more strategic projects.
- Businesses can quickly launch new applications in areas such as predictive analytics and customer relationship management that improve revenue-per-customer and point-of-sale upsell opportunities without lengthy installation and configuration processes.
- The cloud provides a data integration layer that eliminates labour-intensive extract, transfer and load (ETL) procedures and enables analytics to be applied quickly across multiple data sources. Specialised cloud providers can pull data from a company’s on-premise systems and combine it with public and proprietary data sources to yield new insights. This capability would be almost impossible for many smaller businesses to achieve without the cloud.
- Companies can use cloud services to add functionality to their ecommerce sites and call centres to yield rapid benefits. A simple example: the ability for customers to sign up for a mailing list or to pay with Bitcoin. More advanced examples include the addition of customer ratings, configurators or recommendation engines
The importance of competitive advantage to cloud deployment decisions was underscored by a recent survey by 451 Research underwritten by Microsoft. More than half of the respondents cited factors relating to improving technology quality, helping grow the business and adding capabilities that couldn’t be built internally as their principal reasons for moving to the cloud.
“The biggest impact of the cloud is the ability to accelerate the rate of innovation for the business,” says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “The cloud is enabling a tripling in the number of new developers and innovators who can create business value through IT. Together, they are going to create about a tenfold increase in new killer applications.”
