A survey of enterprises by IBM has showed that those who adopt and leverage cloud computing for competitive advantage on average grow twice as fast and double their profit. The company’s Walter Falk, Christopher Ferris, Michael Fork and Rob Sauerwalt outline several areas where businesses can make gains.
Continued technology advancements in cloud computing are creating exceptional opportunities for enterprises to transform business models, supply chains, and their interactions with customers and partners. New technologies and tools are transforming traditional software development lifecycles.
This has a profound impact on how enterprises should think about their business, and they should consider the following:
– Unlocking innovation: Cloud computing is enabling changes in how businesses and society operate and is unlocking huge avenues for innovation. These innovations are leveraging new ecosystems of application services and speeding the creation of solutions for a highly mobile, increasingly interconnected and data-intensive world.
– Scaling through open architectures: Evolution of IBM’s open cloud architecture, based on open source software and open standards, is enabling a new approach to delivering capabilities, workloads and services. This approach results in dramatic improvements in data centre operations, faster application development, and highly scalable solutions deployed on-premise and in the cloud.
– Open ecosystems: Leveraging open ecosystem projects, tools, and technologies can greatly enhance the enterprise’s ability to adapt and leapfrog its competition.
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– Developing rapid business outcomes: Developers are taking a more central role in delivering value to the business. Rapid technology innovations in tools, frameworks, open interfaces and languages are enabling them to create or synthesise highly interactive and dynamic applications that accelerate business outcomes. DevOps innovations coupled with composable cloud services are allowing new cloud-centric applications to be ready in days, rather than months. Deployment to and support of mobile platforms is often the first priority resulting in dramatic usability improvements when done right.
– Engaging social business for competitive advantage: Social applications and mobile devices are transforming customer and partner interactions. Advanced analytics processing applied against the mobile and social interactions provides insights to transform marketing and product innovation, resulting in competitive advantage for those willing to engage.
– Economics of consumption: Emergence of a cloud services consumption model (often called the ‘API economy’) and the availability of composite cloud services based on open standards are creating the opportunity for cost-effective sophisticated solutions for enterprises large and small. In this fast-paced and connected world, each enterprise must continuously transform itself, adapting to this ever-changing business landscape. To enable this continuous transformation, an enterprise needs a flexible digital fabric and application platform, coupled with the right tools and services to rapidly deliver innovations across the enterprise.
This is an extract from IBM’s Redbook ‘Accelerate Development of New Enterprise Solutions for the Cloud with Codename BlueMix’, which can be downloaded here.
