Unlike the global downturn in 2008, most companies today are prepared for the current economic slowdown. The slumping oil prices and geopolitical uncertainty has not deterred companies from progressing forward with their transformation plans.
Interestingly their plans are not to contain, but rather to drive revenue growth, sustain profitability levels, lower expenses and increase market share.
While smaller, younger and more nimble companies, both globally as well as in the region, have been quick to adopt and subscribe to cloud services, the larger companies are not too far behind.
They have focused on low cost high impact initiatives that will either reduce cost or increase profitability. They have launched new products, entered new lines of businesses, expanded into new market segments and new geographies at a rapid pace. These companies have gained the “fast-movers competitive advantage” without creating ripples.
They have identified their core and non-core businesses and focused on enabling their business users, by shifting their non-core businesses to a SaaS cloud service delivery model (Software-as-a-Service). The typical non-core businesses include HCM-human capital management (recruitment & on boarding, talent management, employee collaboration with knowledge sharing, etc); CRM-customer relationship management (online access to the sales team from any device any time, predict opportunities to upsell & cross sell, marketing automation, etc); financial accounting applications (consolidate view from any device, proactive data driven decision making, etc) and more.
Interestingly cloud adoption in the region has also made signification progress over the last couple of years.
For instance a leading real estate company successfully deployed their online recruitment and talent management for their employees; a business conglomerate successfully deployed financials, purchasing and HCM on the cloud; a leading Aairline in Africa implemented customer data management, marketing, sales and service to manage their passenger’s journey; a semi-government organisation deployed sales, marketing and customer data hub to manage it marketing communication and automate its sales force; a leading bank deployed employee self-service, talent management and recruitment.
These companies have successfully scaled their businesses by deploying SaaS solutions across multiple business functions. They have gained their stake holder’s confidence by successfully shifting their capital expenditure (Capex) on non-core business activities to operational expenses (Opex), while delivering higher service levels.
To speed up their “application time to market” and support their innovations, these companies are adopting PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). Thereby being able to deploy environments for development, testing and production, and in the process ensuring a seamless handshake among their developers, tester and end users. They are innovatively adding unique differentiators into their SaaS solutions by building PaaS for SaaS extensions.
Some of these companies are also shifting from an owned data centre by moving their infrastructure needs to IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). Thereby gaining elasticity in their computing capacity and further optimising their cash flow by moving towards an Opex model.
SaaS, PaaS and IaaS are not interdependent on each other, but rather the choice is driven by the application and business needs. These three cloud service delivery models could coexists together in the same or different deployment models.
The cloud deployment models are Private Clouds, Public Clouds, Hybrid Clouds and Community Clouds. The choice of selecting the right fit cloud computing model will depend on the organisation’s type of data, application, levels of security and management required.
Most organisations have adopted a model where both Public and Private clouds coexists in their IT environment, which over a period of time could evolve into Hybrid clouds. The lesser known community clouds have been limited to defence, education and government where the need for common services and security are unique.
Adopting a cloud service delivery model has several benefits such as lowering upfront capital costs; speed and agility to rapidly deploy the IT environment; flexibility to access information anytime from anywhere; scalability to grow as the business grows; automated management, security, monitoring, patching and upgrade services; subscription based services without the need to purchase additional licenses or support; reduced carbon footprint; globalised workforce at reduced costs, etc.
The current economic slowdown is forcing organisations to curb expenses while pursuing their growth trajectory. It is reassuring to witnesses companies such as Oracle confirming their data centre plans for UAE, thereby further extending their wide range of cloud services to the region. This is bound to encourage other cloud service providers to also invest, which would further fuel the adoption of cloud services in the region.
With the dynamically evolving market, disruptive competitive landscape, growing expectations for personalised services from both customers and employees, no amount of planning and preparation will suffice. For organisations still contemplating how to scale their business and when to start their cloud journey, there cannot be a better time than now.
The writer is the Executive Vice-President of Dubai-based TransSys Solutions. He can be contacted via Twitter @Stephen_Fdes
