Opinion: Cloud 9 for the enterprise or is our vision clouded?

Brett Waters, vice president APAC – South, RightNow Technologies, speaks exclusively to CRN about what cloud computing is and how this affects our organisation attitude towards technology.

‘In his book, Living on the Fault Line, Geoffrey Moore states that, in order to be successful, companies should concentrate on their core activities and outsource all other activities.

“For core activities, the goal is to differentiate as much as possible on any variable that impacts customers’ purchase decisions and to assign the best resources in the organisation to that challenge.

By contrast, every other activity in the corporation is not core, it is context. And the winning approach to context tasks is not to differentiate but rather to execute them effectively and efficiently in as standardised a manner as possible.”

His reasoning is clear, making your business a success is reliant upon focused expert energy; a company making sweets should be putting all efforts into making delicious sweets, anything beyond the core processes that result in the business being a success should be outsourced, as ‘there is no context that cannot become someone else’s core.’

Of course, most technology and software applications are context to the majority of companies, certainly in our sweet producer example this is true.

So Moore’s argument is that only core technology deployments should be dealt with internally, everything else should be outsourced to a ‘cloud’ technology vendor whose core business it is; in turn enterprises will become more resourceful and effective, helping them gain a competitive edge.

So what has a cloud got to do with it? In basic terms, Cloud computing is Internet based development and use of computer technology.

It incorporates SaaS, Web 2.0 and other capabilities where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying computing needs.

The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet and the image of a cloud in network diagrams is used to show the internet but hides the complex infrastructure that it conceals.