Cloud computing is emerging as a major disruptive force for both IT vendors and users. The headlines "Demo start ups go for the cloud", "Clouds appearing in the sky of outsourcing" and many other such catchy phrases abound due to the widespread belief that the next few years will see rapid maturity of cloud computing models. Meanwhile Vendors and enterprises are grappling with opportunities and challenges that come with cloud computing.
Cloud based businesses, initially will be characterized by High Volume and Low Margins. This is comparable to any Discount Retailer or a Category Killer- Big Bazaar or Wal-Mart - that offer merchandise at very competitive prices in a mature market. While the margins are typically less, they pull masses and sell huge volumes every day. Thus transaction volume makes this method a success - even with a very low profit per unit.
Public clouds run a volume business similar to that of a discount retailer. Scale-out clouds operate large-scale infrastructure similar to that of the above mentioned example. These public cloud services are eventually expected to quickly commoditize and continue to compete mainly on price.
Case in point is the Amazon's public cloud, EC2 that has helped numerous businesses to scale out rapidly without upfront cash outlay. The following study shows how California based firm TC3 Health utilize market growth opportunity quickly using EC2.
TC3 Health helps health insurance providers avoid over payments by flagging billing errors, duplicate payments and identity fraud. The company started allowing clients to submit their electronic archives for retroactive processing. Demand for services escalated overnight. The only problem was that TC3 Funnel could handle maximum of 1 million claims a day. Handling this increased demand would have cost not only $750,000 in extra servers and software licenses but also more than $30,000 a month in new maintenance and hosting fees. TC3 opted for Amazon's EC2 for incremental processing power. Now TC3 Health spends a mere $600 a month on EC2 fees, including customer support. That is $29,400 a month less than what it would have spent on on-premise servers. The company's revenue rose to $20 million last year, which would have been a tough call for TC3 had it not reached into the cloud.
All this means one thing for sure that end user SMBs will be ultimate winners as major vendors will be rolling out platters of services addressing their business pain points and challenges. Apart from this, over the next few years, platforms for aggregating, integrating and syndicating Cloud services will proliferate. Such aggregators will provide a platform for smaller Channel Partners to sell Cloud services. One can expect this to become a hotbed of start-ups which will foster innovation and creative ideas. The ecosystem of public cloud and cloud services vendors together with aggregators, channel partners and value added resellers will shift the market favorably in favor of smaller agile businesses which are more responsive to target markets. However, in this scenario niche businesses will have an advantage. The need to tune into specific target markets and address unique hitherto untapped needs will definitely count a great deal. Shaadi.com and Naukri.com made early moves in the niches and have stuck in public memory due to early moves advantage. In the new normal Cloud computing world, the niches have split to micro-niches - so it's time now for GovtShaadi.com and telecomitjobs.coms.
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