Genrich Altshuller, an Inventor and scientist has busted the myth that innovators are born, he also published another astounding discovery: Researching over 200,000 patents, he concluded that 98 percent of innovations are known ideas applied in a new scenario!!
If one carefully evaluates cloud as an innovation, it would fit this definition. Compared to on premise applications, overall TCO, ability to provide better technology to users, time to adopt and manageability of operations are far superior with cloud. Cloud adoption can fall into one or multiple of the buckets SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Brillio was born as an organization (demerger of IT services arm from a larger entity) with the primary goal of helping customer imagine digital possibilities and realize transformation to their business in a rapid way. To spur this customer centric goal, the entire internal systems landscape covering financial, human capital, sales, communication and collaboration was brought in to support rapid automation and building an empowered and open culture. With this background of running cloud operations, following are few top reasons how cloud brings significant benefits than on premise models.
Product Agility in cloud makes a significant difference
As the customization to the product was managed on premise at the customer's place, variability compounded leading to upgrades becoming projects in themselves. In a traditional on premise organization that does one or two releases a year, the time lag between the times a developer writes code to customer using it would at the least be 12+ months, even if the customer chooses to upgrade immediately on release of a new version. Most cloud players with an agile way of development could get this time gap to weeks/months. This is possible as they are multi-tenanted. This makes the products feature rich and closer to what the customer needs. The implementation of Salesforce and NetSuite can upgrade most features seamlessly making the adoption cycle much faster.
Product Flexibility is growing in a faster pace in SAAS based applications
There is a popular myth that one cannot customize cloud products to organization’s needs. Today cloud players like Salesforce and NetSuite have innovative ways of customizing with minimal impacts to the underlying system. This is primarily because of two reasons. Firstly, these products are built with customization capability in mind. For example, advanced analytics have been built in most products that make report customizations in on premise applications a thing of the past. Secondly, most of them package a PaaS platform with the product that helps organization build apps and extend the product functionalities.
Internal System team become business Savvy
A famous quote goes as this “You are what you think most of the time”. This is true for the systems team. A typical system consisted of multiple layers – infra layer that included servers, data layer that had databases and the functionality layer that contained the code. Now with a typical SAAS application, team only manages a part of the functionality layer. This makes the team focused towards functionality which is the language of the business teams. This brings better alignment and benefits in the longer run.
Better User Experience & Superior Technology
UX field is highly evolving. With the advent of single click functionalities with mobile, a drive to re-architect user interfaces from user angle is a drive happening across products. With faster release cycles, cloud players have been able to cope with this change much faster than any on premise systems. Most cloud systems today are mobile first and are able to bring a multi-channel experience to the users. This puts their user experience capabilities leveraging newer technology ahead of erstwhile on premise products.
Lower TCO
Total cost of ownership considers the lifetime cost of the solution and not just the implementation or annual cost of running the application. Considering just the license cost, there may not be significant difference or cloud may seem to be on the higher side. However, if we consider the other cost elements like servers, databases, upgrades and also the opportunity cost lost due to delayed functionalities, the benefits far outweigh the costs of an on premise system.
Conclusion:
If we look at every large player in the market like Microsoft, Oracle and so on, each of them measure and report how their cloud revenue is growing. This clearly shows that the investment is on cloud and it is a matter of time, cloud becomes the norm.
