Everything as a Service
With everything moving in to The Cloud, everything can be delivered as a service, as simple as that. You name it and it can be delivered as a service. Application, data, infrastructure, search, platform, payment and what not -all can be delivered through cloud. According to Gartner, during the next few years, market dynamics will determine whether cloud sourcing will be the demise of traditional outsourcing, if it will lead to the convergence of services and products currently marketed “as a service” or if it will result in next-generation outsourcing.
Have a look at what HP says about Everything as a Service.
In short, we have laid the groundwork to offer an integrated cloud ecosystem — or any of its parts as discrete components — to all of our customers. At the same time, we have developed cloud services adjacent to our core businesses. From digital printing to IT infrastructure itself, we have offerings as broad and varied as HP’s portfolio.
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Call it “Everything as a Service” or “Anything as a Service,” various diverse services that can be delivered over the Internet are increasing. Last year when I started working on this list, it just had Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service, but later this list started growing and terms like Publishing as a Service, Knowledge as a Service and evenGovernment as a Service started popping up. At this point of time, I have around twenty-something on that list. This new ability to manage various diverse services over the Internet offers many compelling business advantages.
Cloud computing which enables “Everything as a Service” is a disruptive and game-changing technology that’s expected to reshape every business over the next decade. According to Sogeti’s CTO Michiel Boreel, “Cloud computing is much more of an opportunity than it is a threat.” He further says, “But when you ignore an opportunity long enough, it becomes a threat.”
This move towards cloud computing signals a fundamental shift in how we deal with information. It is like the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when large farms and big businesses were shutting down their own generators and started purchasing power from efficient third-party industrial utilities. Google Docs and Webmail are cloud computing examples, and at the government enterprise level, cloud computing offers a cost-effective, service-oriented approach for sharing computing resources, whereby common computing infrastructure, applications, enterprise data, and solutions can be utilized across the enterprises and governments. For example, Apps.gov is a place where government agencies can gather information about how Federal Cloud Computing can help create sustainable, green and more cost-effective IT.
Let’s look at a few “as a Service” models:
SaaS (Software as a Service)
Functionality delivered over the Web often using a subscription model. Gmail and Facebook are perfect example for SaaS. Major enterprise products are Microsoft Exchange as a service, Google Apps for business and Salesforce.com for CRM.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Infrastructure as a Service is the delivery of Information Technology infrastructure as a service. Rather than purchasing data center space, servers, software, network equipment or storage, you buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. A few of the big players are Amazon Web Services (AWS), RackSpace, and GoGrid.
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
It enables the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and multiple software layers. PaaS also provides various methods required to support the complete lifecycle of building and delivering applications and services over Web. Big players in this field are Google App Engine and Force.com.
Kaas (Knowledge as a Service)
Crowd-sourced over social network or on-demand approach to skill acquisitions. It could be as professional as Service Cloud from salesforce.com or crowd-sourced Quora engine which is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by everyone who uses it. Another example would beLinkedin Answers which is used to get fast, accurate answers to your business-related questions; you can also use business advice from hundreds of thousands of experts and Lawpivot which is crowd-sourced, confidential legal advice for businesses.
Government as a Service
Call it “Open Government” or “Government 2.0,” cloud computing and “Everything as a Service” models for any government is going to improve citizen relationship management and change the way government delivers services to citizens, businesses and fellow civil servants. Economics of cloud computing is so large because it supports extreme technical and operational scalability.
Using cloud computing services, government agencies do not need to own data center infrastructure to launch a capability that serves millions of users. Why do you think the US administration is shutting down more than 100 of its 2,094 data centers this calendar year, as part of a larger effort to shutter 800 centers by 2015. According to federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, “Cloud solutions not only help to lower the cost of government operations, they also drive innovation across government.”
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More and more organizations will be using cloud to build their Web personalization engines, customer behavior analyses and data mining algorithms. With little or no capital investment, you can get a cost-effective platform for developing analytics models, reports and driving business intelligence for your organization. Cloud computing holds significant promise for smart organizations that are looking for new business models with enhanced innovation potential, because now, with the combination and integration of various cloud services, they can provide multiple services with capacities that can be adjusted to clients’ needs more quickly and “anywhere, anytime,” along with unprecedented scalability.
Source: IdeaEngineers
