Cloud Isn’t The Future; It’s The Now
Industry analysts estimate that 12% of business applications are now hosted on the public cloud – and that number is growing fast. What are the real advantages? And how can your company and IT department take advantage of them?
You Say You Want a Revolution
At Innoveer sometimes we get a bit carried away and walk around talking about how Node.js, Ruby and the REST API are going to remake all business applications into fun, engaging, and perhaps even ‘gamified’ productivity tools. These are all very exciting modern technologies, and of course they will, but that isn’t necessarily the point.
Real World Advantages
These new, cloud applications offer significant rewards for companies that properly adopt them. Our experiences in deploying these technologies have taught us that the primary benefits are:
- Time to Market; cloud technologies lend themselves very well to a more agile development approach, rapid prototyping and ultimately a quicker deployment timetable.
- Time to Change; once the applications are up and running, changing them is equally as rapid. Our clients are now moving away from “releases” and simply deploying changes as they’re built.
- Easier Integration; for older applications like Siebel, SAP or Pivotal, integration was somewhat of an afterthought. With modern cloud applications like Salesforce.com, integration is incredibly easy – often simply by applying an API key, making deployments easier and reducing testing.
- Lower TCO; one of the best known aspects of the cloud is its ability to lower ongoing maintenance and support. Many of our customers like the ease of upgrades and have redeployed internal teams to more value-add functions such as enhancements.
- New Functionality; there are some things that really can only be done using cloud technology – like social media integration or adding Google Maps to show a field service rep the best route to a client.
- Mobilization; remember how hard it was to deploy data from your old applications on an iPhone or Android device? This is no longer the case with cloud applications which often have mobile versions or mobile sites that are easily configured and deployed.
- Adoption; we have found that users of cloud CRM applications adopt them at a significantly higher rate than their predecessors. Some of this is surely due to the modern user interface elements that have taken elements from the consumer web.
How Can We Help
Modern cloud applications are great, but how do you choose the right one? Or choose the right integration approach or technical architecture for your future needs? Innoveer has experience in helping clients in this area and has created a Cloud Technology Selection service to ensure deployment and adoption success.
