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Multiple suppliers and brokers
Cloud solutions seem to have a common characteristics in that theyare small
enough to provide the end user with only one solution. Most of the time the
business user will need a set of multiple applications to do the work with.
Multiple solutions may mean that there are multiple suppliers involved. The
one thing the user organisation should not seek for, is to have multiple
contracts from a huge number of suppliers. The processes to maintain that
situation will be undesireable, will take too much effort and will probably
not be worth the costs involved. The trick here is to get suppliers to work
together to have only one contract and let the organisation that owns the
contract, deal with the multiplicity of suppliers. In this case the Cloud
supplier may become the broker for the user organisation. Cloud brokers
are not a commonality yet. Gartner, in their 2012 predictions reports,
expect that Cloud brokers will emerge in two years. Whenever user
organisations get into Clouds in a more complex way, like multiple Cloud
solutions on multiple platforms, a Cloud broker who has knowledge of both
worlds will be able to combine the multlipicities into one contract. In a way,
this will make more sense than what is happening now. Suppliers want to
keep all their solutions to themselves without seeking the benefit of
partnerships. Cloud brokers probably will fill this space. In the end the user
organisation has a contract with one Cloud broker and the suppliers also
have to deal only with this Cloud broker. In that way any organisation,
supply‐ and demand side, can focus on their own business and internal
processes.
Changes for small and medium businesses
Small and medium businesses (SMBs) have gained access to computing
power, applications, and services they could never imagine to be in their
reach ever before.
There are Cloud service opportunities in the global SMB marketplace,
ranging from replacing companies’ in‐house IT solutions, to acquiring new
adopters who currently have no in‐house solution, to upselling current
customers to more advanced services.
How can we differentiate between SMB’s in the future? First types are SMBs
currently having in‐house solutions but are moving (or planning to move) to
hosted services. Second are SMBs that currently have no in‐house IT
solution and are moving directly to the Cloud, so they skip the step of
purchasing in‐house IT. These SMB’s can also include new SMBs who choose
Cloud services over traditional in‐house IT as they are starting their
businesses. And the third group is SMBs, which are already using some form
