Staying competitive with Cloud

Last month I was delighted to present at the Cloud World Forum in London. Among a variety of other vendors, resellers and customers everyone was there to talk about the benefits of Cloud services. For my presentation (see below) I decided to focus on being competitive. What most businesses, especially SMEs, need right now is a way to gain an advantage. To gain an advantage, businesses must innovate. I spoke on how Cloud allowed companies to do just that.

In the past, in order to innovate, companies could either develop innovative processes or innovative products. However, later studies showed that companies who could develop both innovative processes and products were the most successful. Sounds easy in theory, but is tricky in practice.

Aside from the sheer amount of time that it takes to regularly innovate, the main challenge facing many organisations is capital. It takes money to innovate and these days investment is harder to come by. No doubt many of you would have read reports of banks not wanting to lend to SMEs.

So how do businesses that don’t have sufficient capital still manage to innovate? Cloud services have the potential to be a fantastic cost-saver as the costs are elastic. Depending on the delivery model that you choose, the level of service usage can be scaled-up or down. Need more space for a short term project? Simply pay for the additional space, then once you’re done with it you pay less. This flexible OpEx model lets businesses experiment without emptying their wallets.

How do I know this works? Well, before joining Colt I had all the pressures of a small business, stretching my budget so the organisation could evolve, so I can testify on how successful a flexible Cloud model can be for allowing a business to try things out. I’m proud to say that with Colt I’m now allowing other businesses to do the same. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how the cloud can be a catalyst for innovation - please feel free to comment below.