Have you seen ‘Floppy Disk’?
Folks who have been around in IT for more than a decade, may still remember the old day ‘floppy disks’. During my early years in university, I developed a passion for programming. After a month or so of hardcore coding, one evening, I typed a wrong command ‘Format C:\’ instead of ‘Format D:\’ in a PC with floppy disks! Even though I took the floppy disk out immediately, but the damage was done and I lost all of my months’ worth of codes.
Copy 500MB of images to where?
While being part of international Commercial Excellence team, I was sent to Jakarta to prepare responses to a complex RFP (Proposal/Bid), with 10 or so of my colleagues. During the preparation, we had to get hundreds of pages of diagrams ready for a Telecom client. Now, those diagrams were big and sitting in a server in China and we were sitting in Jakarta; we ended up in spending 48+ hours of continuous copy and paste from one server in China to another PC in Jakarta! If we had cloud then, we could have saved our common library in cloud and get those from there. We’re actually doing it now, by building up our Commercial Library in a Cloud-based Proposal Platform called, ‘TinderBox’.
The Cloud Advantage
I have been reading this interesting article from GE, ‘The Cloud Advantage’, and then I could relate a common question from our clients regarding Commercial Platforms and CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote). Almost in all cases, our clients will ask ‘Is it available offline?’, and we will always answer that our proposed platform will be cloud-based. In addition to availability, reliability and security, what other advantages do we see from moving to the Cloud?
Click here to download the complete document from GE.
[Ping me if you need a copy]
“With the advent of the Industrial Internet come the challenges of scale and speed. Scale is required to consolidate and manage massive volumes and varieties of dynamic and time-series machine data. Speed is needed to leverage this data with analytics in real-time. The imperative for industrial IOT is a secured environment with capacity to grow at the speed of machine data and the technical infrastructure to apply sophisticated analytics that drive insights for more profitable business decisions for industrial companies.
According to Gartner, the uptake in the use of cloud services is accelerating rapidly. Gartner forecasts that total annual spending on public cloud services will nearly double within four years — from $152 billion at year end 2014 to over $282 billion in 2018.According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, for the five-year forecast period, IDC expects that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.1% and will reach $53.1 billion by 2019 accounting for 46% of the total spending on enterprise IT infrastructure. At the same time, spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure will decline at -1.7% CAGR.”
Let me quickly explain how the advantages mentioned in that document (copied here) relate to our Commercial Platforms/CPQ.
1. Speed to Implementation and Innovation: Cloud architecture delivers the ability to rapidly develop and deploy Commercial Platforms/CPQ platforms. It achieves this speed by providing standardized approach and self-service options.
2. Security: Security for Cloud-based CPQ/Commercial platforms can be really robust as those Cloud providers make investment in security software, capabilities, facilities and expertise.
3. Lower costs: Without going to Cloud, in-house Commercial/CPQ platforms would have needed huge investment in enterprise infrastructure to enable the users fast and reliable access to the platforms. Speed & performance become a bigger problem over time, as the investment in servers tends to go up with the increase in capacity demand.
4. Ability to scale: It is much easier to scale the Cloud-based Commercial/CPQ platforms to meet growing business demand, without being restricted by hardware capabilities of the computer servers. For one implementation of CPQ, we ran 3 parallel projects on the same CPQ platform, without slowing each other down.
5. Global access: With the global user base, for Commercial/CPQ Platforms, global access has become a critical success factors. With good Cloud providers, we can provide faster access to non-North American users, especially in other continents.
