“The cloud is not for the faint hearted,” warns Technology One CEO Adrian Di Marco in describing his company’s evolution into a software as service provider.
“We thought that this was five to ten years away, I’d like to say we got that wrong and this phenomena is happening now.” Di Marco said at the company’s 2014 Evolve conference on the Gold Coast today, “we’ve seen huge uptake in companies going to the cloud.”
A virtuous circle
Responding to that demand meant that Technology One had to redesign their software and update it to the meet the very different requirements of cloud services.
What Di Marco found in moving Technology One’s software onto the cloud was it became easier to identify problems and inefficiencies in his product, creating what he calls a “virtuous circle”.
It’s not just Di Marco’s customers who’ve been through that process, Technology One itself has gone all cloud internally with the company using services like Google Docs and Salesforce.
The aim of moving online is to make organisations more flexible with Di Marco citing the newly reformed Noosa Council in Queensland as being able to get up and running in four months by using cloud services.
Problems with the cloud
Despite being an enthusiast for cloud computing, Di Marco does sees some problems with the cloud, the first being that the term is overused and ill-defined which results in services being mis-sold.
A bigger problem in Di Marco’s view is a ‘gold rush’ has developed around the concept with revenue hungry vendors looking at making money
“IT companies, particularly consultancy firms, have over the last few years seen their revenues decline so to find new sources of growth they are all targeting the cloud.”
“Everybody wants to become a cloud provider, everyone wants to provide strategic services to do with the cloud.”
“There’s a lot of people offering very mediocre ideas, concepts and services.”
The key takeaway for businesses from Di Marco’s presentation was businesses need to be careful about their choices of cloud services providers.
Di Marco’s other point is that cloud services work best when there aren’t intermediaries such as resellers and integrators involved that reduce efficiencies and add costs.
“The cloud is a platform for the future of business,” sums up Di Marco. “Businesses that move to the cloud have an enormous strategic advantage, they can move at a pace that normal business can’t. They can move fast and innovate quickly.”