So, why were my colleagues questioning about The Cloud?
In an Uber ride home, I started to think more about the earlier line of questions & discussions about the Cloud technology as I tried to relate it to my past years of exposer and experience with the Cloud Technology.
The Changing landscape!
As I started to think my thoughts meandered and begun to analyse the current state of business landscape within Australia. Fortunate enough to have exposure to a wide variety of industries, I started to realise that there are substantial portion companies are not resting on their laurels. They are trying to understand how to optimise their business operations to stay alive. Saying that some of them being already successful in finding the keys to transform and upgrade their kingdom, but most are struggling to understand what that change means in light of 4th-gen technology revolution in progress.
The driving forces for a change with winners & strugglers?
As digital disruption has been the most popular buzzword recently, but it lacks to describe the fundamental changes we are witnessing over the last few years. So, to further advance my understanding and thought process to the next level, I started to ask a more profound question — what is driving all these businesses to make this shift and why are some business winning or struggling?
What I found was very interesting but not complete surprise. As a new technology revolution has been brewing it has also been busy creating and crafting business into district performance classes:
1.) The Elite & High Performers, and
2.) Medium and the Low Performers.
And depending on which class or bucket you belong, will define if you will grow and sustain your market share or decline and perish in the time of 4th industrial revolution!
The Medium and the Low Performers type, are the one who thinks, there is no need to transform if revenue is fine. They are the prosperous business with a substantial monopoly who got comfortable and complacent with doing what they have always done and become more internally focussed (product-focused) than externally focussed (CUSTOMER FOCUSSED). Remember Toys R Us, Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, HP and many others bellowing to this list were once a favourite, but no longer.
Whereas the organisations bellowing to the Elite & High Performers group believe, as part of this new revolution, every company now needs to be a technology company. They are the businesses who acknowledge the 4th industrial revolution’s presence and started to realise the real importance of the data (the secret sauce) and what this new magic sauce can do.
Talking to some of the business leaders within this group of high performers what I found is that their core business model and belief system is very different from the other group. As I asked, what pushed them to adapt and transform, the answer was simple, the new technology business revolution creates transparent access to all form of data, the ability to perform meaningful analytics on this data. It enriches the ease of collaboration across the different team to make use of these analytics which is critical for running a successful business in today’s age. And to exploit the power of smart-data, you have to have ensure your tech-ecosystem foundation is successfully transitioned and transformed to the Cloud, as they further clarified.
These group of companies have shattered their outdated business models and are using cloud technology and big data to win customers in exciting new ways. Rather than a disruption of the status quo, what we’re seeing is a New Industrial Revolution. For example, a business-like Amazon, build on this new thinking (digital/online / customer-centric) how quickly and easily evolved from an online bookstore to a global marketplace for buying virtually any products. There are others the likes of Uber, VRBO, PayPal and Airbnb.
It is all excellent news for all new-age digital organisations. But still, the question stayed open for me, how a traditional business can remain relevant in this data led tsunami of changes?
The IT platforms and services hosting Data services have drastically evolved in the last decade with the adoption and enhancement of underling platform technologies like Cloud and Containers. And the Cloud Technology is like a primer-technology for unearthing the possible dynamite potential that Data or should I say Smart-Data brings to any given business.
As my investigation ‘moving to the cloud’ continued over the coming days, revealing that some of the top business leaders and owners of the legacy technology eco-systems are very aware of the advantages of using Cloud Technology and are trying to approach this uncharted territory. In discussions with these leaders, we found, although the new Cloud led technologies brings better Data-Intelligence features & smarts, it is no easy task to stay abreast while adopting them and get real benefits out of them. And this problem is further magnified if they are an enterprise whose business systems and IT works:
- the traditional way,
- running huge monolithic legacy apps,
- supported by multiple processes,
- on conventional hosting platforms,
- spread over multiple data-centres,
- across different geographical locations, which are now almost outdated.
And, to add to that the non-technology half:
- people,
- process &
- culture is also outdated and monolithic too!
Let’s summaries:
· Smart-Data is what you after, and
· Cloud is Foundation for data to be intelligently exploited for a business to stay relevant.
· It is all good if you are a new-age digital organisation, but if you are a business with legacy monolithic IT eco-system it is no smooth transition!
Reflecting on my past success in leading multiple complicated legacy IT-Ecosystem transition to the multi-cloud platform, I started to have some questions of my own. Something is still missing. I said to myself, maybe my colleagues were not questioning the Cloud, perhaps they trying to figure out how to successfully transition to the Cloud!
So, I said to myself- maybe I have to keep going in my pursuit to dig a little further to see what else can I find, learn and share! → Part-3…
