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CLOUD COMPUTING – The New Way of doing Old Things


The NASSCOM India Leadership Forum (NILF) drummed in one core thought – loud and clear to all assembled delegates – ‘The old order changeth’.

It is important to find ways to work differently, more efficiently and more productively. It is not enough to try to do the same thing in the same manner. The need is to change the paradigm. Question the status quo.

The old norms of pricing for IT solutions would soon be thrown out of the Windows – no pun intended here. Customers are unsure of their own business survival; and hence, are expecting their partners and associated companies to aid them in developing solutions to help make their decisions smarter and better.

Solutions to be provided quickly; global launch on the fly. Sounds ludicrous? Not any more. Cloud Computing is in. These kind of solutions will ensure that organizations can ramp up faster; scale up speedier. And not at the cost of the proverbial many arms and many legs.

For instance, one session talked about how a Banking Client rolled out an innovative Zero Branch Bank in Europe. Oracle is helping them put this together. All touchpoints are automated. Of course, not just that! The application is a Hosted Solution model. Rather than investing in infrastructure to be deployed over many months and years, this will ensure rollout in a fraction of that time.

The learnings from this Live example??  – Even if times are bleak, innovative solutions are always going to invite discretionary spending by organizations.

As pointed out by Peter Coffee (Salesforce) and Sharad Sharma (Yahoo R&D), the most glaringly outstanding examples of how an existing proposition has been successfully remodeled and presented to the world is of how CLOUD COMPUTING has enabled the runaway success of AMAZON and FACEBOOK. The former utilized Cloud Computing as a Development Platform while Facebook used it for a Distribution Platform. This enabled both these business ideas to ramp up into global entities pronto.  And ofcourse, the cost savings on doing it all in this manner instead of an on-premise-model  have been huge too.

Given the very nature of the beast called CLOUD COMPUTING, it would not be foolhardy to expect that the next big blockbuster business hits aka YAHOO or FACEBOOK can be from the garages or streetcorners of Hyderabad or Mumbai or Delhi.

The NILF also had a heady mix of celebrated and eloquent academicians. This lot expectedly stated their perspective take, without mincing many words. Professor Pankaj Ghemawat, who has already made his mark as a noted academician who redefines norms did the same during his session. He highlighted the need for focusing on the Key metric of Revenue per Employee. Seems obviously simple? Inspite of this, this key metric has remained flat for most Indian IT companies over the last 4-5 years.

Having said that, the intention should not be to cut costs needlessly or retrench benches but to work towards shoring up efficiencies.

Some to Dos (This is not intended an exhaustive Dhobi List):

  • No Needless Buyouts
  • No carte blanche reduction in headcount
  • Reshape. Don’t just retrench
  • LIFO approach in retrench to be avoided
  • No moratorium on training and development

The message to all is that the Cloud looms large over the blue sky. The Dark Clouds shall soon pass – but the Clouds of the Computing kind are real and here to stay. The Cloud Computing concepts are going to be the new paradigm shift happening while we speak and let’s embrace it.

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1 Discussion on “CLOUD COMPUTING – The New Way of doing Old Things”
  • Indeed a very well written article, very informative thanks for posting it on the net. I could use this as reference and many others can also use it.
    Thanks again…
    Rahul Bhatt (rahulbhatt@i2k2.com)
    Cloud Computing, Dedicated Web / Email Server, Zimbra Hosting

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