in: Cloud Computing, Company News
A pressing question facing all competitive companies in a global environment is how to drive costs down while increasing profits.
In the age of cloud services and cloud business computing, this question is at the core of determining whether Cloud is the right fit for any business. It’s all about optimizing business costs and profits to produce a total customer experience that generates revenue.
Most companies are facing the question as to whether to cloud or not to cloud. The companies I have spoken to, across a wide range of vertical industries such as Food and Beverage, Apparel, Consumer Goods, and Automotive, recognize that Cloud based services offer an option to outsource a variety of technologies with the expectation of reducing both operational and infrastructure business costs. However, companies are aware of the risks associated with outsourcing and always need to consider the loss of control that comes with outsourcing a company’s infrastructure, as well as, the significant learning/training curve needed by staff during a transition period. More importantly, a business always needs to evaluate whether the expected reduction of business costs effectively results in increasing revenue.
Subsequently, Cloud Computing and Cloud Services promise a new way of operating for business but it also comes with risk, and like everything else in business, needs to be evaluated on the basis of trade-offs that can be measured in dollars—the lifeblood of modern business. It’s these measurable trade-offs that are very difficult to evaluate when it comes to the adoption of new technologies such as Cloud based services.
The difficulty of measuring these trade-offs is often raised in conversations that I have with Edisoft customers. Primarily, owner operators of companies with revenue between $20 million to $75 million, who have shared their views that decreasing IT hardware costs, coupled with the advent of automated applications as legitimate reasons to continue with on premises software solutions rather than migrate to a Cloud based software service.
To fully understand the pros and cons of such trade-offs, a company has to first come to terms with defining their own growth plan and also being able to calculate the profit margin of their business. Moving to the Cloud really hinges on coming to terms with how such a decision would impact company profits. Without the ability to achieve this understanding, many companies will continue to be asking themselves a very simple question, “To Cloud or Not to Cloud”, and not arrive at a satisfactory answer.
-GM and VP of Sales and Marketing at Edisoft
