Why Hasn’t Cloud Had a Bigger Disruption on the Services Industry?
If you read the technology news in the press and social media sites, it’s apparent that we’re in the midst of a big sea of change in which the as-a-Service and public cloud models are transforming the services industry. HP and IBM’s travails and Oracle’s slowdown are laid at the feet of the SaaS providers. But when you pile all the current cloud activity together, it amounts to a hill of beans, not a mountain. Why aren’t we seeing evidence that disruption from these models is happening on a significant scale?
The buzz
In the famous words of an American hamburger TV commercial several years ago: “Where’s the beef?” Everyone is talking about big agendas to rework workload portfolios and making big efforts to to do that. Yes, Accenture has invested well over $1 billion around cloud and several Indian providers have invested $100+ million a year in mobility and cloud work. And the HCL-CSC alliance is predicated on the fact that there will be a huge cloud sandwich for which they want to position themselves.
If you give providers half a moment, they’ll wax with great eloquence and excitement about the prospects for the cloud model as a high-growth area in services. But if cloud disruption is coming to the services industry, it must be walking; it sure isn’t running.
Where are the billion-dollar practices that do cloud? Why don’t we see service providers launching entire new practices or start-ups reworking applications so they work in the cloud? Who is doing all the work?
The reality
The answer to the above questions is that disruption to service providers is happening occasionally but not en mass.
It reminds me of a conversation I overheard around the impending revolution about self-driving cars. Supposedly a Google executive was saying that it’s not likely that new self-driving car will come on the market and people will buy them when they arrive. Instead, he believes the more likely scenario is that we’ll find ourselves using cars that park themselves and then over time become incrementally more capable and eventually driving themselves. But we won’t have gone through that aha moment where we went out to buy a self-driving car.
I think the same thing is happening with cloud disruption. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that companies are driving huge transformations to the cloud right now. Maybe it’s a timing issue in which CIOs and large enterprises will become comfortable enough with the technology that they’ll move en mass to rework their ecosystems to embrace this model. But maybe they won’t embrace it like this and, instead, the industry will wake up one day and find that we’ve incrementally adopted SaaS, public cloud and private cloud.
Perhaps the tide bringing cloud disruption is coming in slowly rather than in as a tsunami. What do you think?
