The Cloud is coming to an enterprise near you. It’s inevitable.
The term SaaS may have been coined in 2001, but it’s the past four years that have seen a significant push of cloud into business. Now enterprises are poised to migrate to cloud solutions in ever-increasing waves.
SaaS solutions have been embraced by departments throughout the organization, particularly sales, marketing and finance. If the predictions from analyst firms and large technology companies are correct, entire organizations are becoming, or will become, cloud-based within the next five years. Promises of low costs, faster deployments and accelerated time to market for related apps are the main drivers of momentum.
Having said this, there are a handful of groups trying to hold back the ocean. The four groups trying to stall this change are:
1) IT professionals trying to keep control (and in some cases their jobs)
2) Ultra conservative management teams that fear change and will only embrace it when there’s no other option
3) Technically uninformed who don’t have a basis to evaluate solutions themselves
4) Organizations who have a vested interest in the status quo
The irony is innovation is what drives successful companies and trying to control innovation stifles it. The reality is if someone cares about the future of their company, they’re probably already using a cloud-based solution somewhere in the organization, possibly developing on a PaaS.
My prediction for the near future is companies will choose to switch first to PaaS and eventually IaaS as competitive advantages. Next, follower companies embrace cloud computing out of fear of being left behind. The reality is there will always be a group of companies that will never switch, but if Forrester Research analyst Stefan Ried’s forecast that the PaaS market alone will be larger than $10 billion USD in less than 10 years is accurate, many will.
Fork In The Road 