Article: Is your business ready for the 21st Century?
by Asif Nawaz. Published on September 30, 2009.
If you haven’t been reading the news about where business technology is headed in the very near future, this article should motivate you to do that.
With previews of Microsoft Office 2010 and its clould-like nature making the news along with Google’s announcement of launching Google Wave’s beta testing, the need for many businesses to spend capital on technology will fade away fast.
We’ve written articles in the past on power of cloud computing and Software as a Service applications, and as a company that develops and sells applications and software in the cloud, we can tell you that the cloud is here to stay, especially the SaaS version of the cloud.
Essentially, for any business to use the cloud is to utilize the basics of economics. One of the fundamental principles of modern economics was that businesses specialise, and when they do so, they can achieve levels of efficiency, quality and economies of scale that others are unable to.
In the world of cloud computing, there are basically three levels of service, with three different kinds of service providers, all of whom specialize in their own fields. See the diagram below from Markus Klems for reference:
This diagram basically shows that from the centre out, there are three different providers of cloud computing:
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
If you’ve got your own development and IT management team who understands your specific business, this is probably the best way for you to proceed. Why host your own servers and spend money on maintaining hardware? This is the least specialised application of the cloud model and is what is commonly done by web hosting companies.
PaaS - Platform as a Service
This is what Amazon and Force.com do best. You’ve got the infrastructure setup, and you use the tools available develop your own software for your business. It takes the cost out of software licensing and the hardware, but you still need to worry about project management, updates and bugs.
SaaS – Software as a Service
This is the most sophisticated specialized application of cloud computing. Delivering SaaS applications is one of the things we do extremely well at VAFTA, and this is precisely the level of sophistication that Salesforce.com has achieved in the CRM realm, and that we are achieving in partnering with Microsoft and Delivering hosted Dynamics CRM. In this model, the cost to you and your business is minimal. You don’t pay upfront, you don’t pay for hardware, project management or software developers. You only pay for what you need, when you need and if you need it. It takes the complexity out of acquiring technology.
So, what’s the proof that using the cloud is vital to surviving in the 21st century? Other than the fact that leading research companies are saying that, Microsoft has just announced the launch of a call centre / server housing facility in Texas that can house up to 100,000 servers. That’s bigger than any software developer can house in any one location, and is simply reminiscent of the fact that Microsoft is preparing to build a cloud so big, so powerful and so robust, that running your business on it should be super-fast, low cost, and plain good sense.
So, let me ask you why you want to spend over £10,000+ per month maintaining your own exchange server, Oracle Database, or other software in addition to the licensing fees if all you had to pay for was a fraction of the cost per employee?
Imagine what your competitors can do with an additional £120,000+ per year. Then imagine how much better off you can be by having that cash to spend before your competition.
Interested? Call us today to see how you can benefit from the cloud.
