Cloud Computing: Thriving on Adversity

Economist Joseph Schumpeter

In an article, “Thriving on adversity,” in the new Schumpeter business and management column in The Economist, West Coast Bureau Chief Adrian Woolrich argues that “recessions—particularly gut-wrenching slumps like this one—provide as many opportunities for business people as they do for politicians. Although they are often called ‘slowdowns,’ recessions shake things up rather than slowing them down. They reward strengths and expose weaknesses, create new opportunities and kill old habits, release pent-up energy and destroy old business models.”

After writing about patterns of creative destruction and successful outcomes for companies such as Hewlett-Packard during the Great Depression and other recessions, Woolrich concludes that “there is also every reason to believe that the current recession will produce lots of upstarts. The Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurship, points out that about half of Fortune 500 and Inc. 500 companies (lists of the biggest and fastest-growing firms in America, respectively), including such household names as FedEx, CNN, and Microsoft, were founded during recessions or bear markets. A disproportionate number of these upstarts produced industry-changing ideas that established companies failed to appreciate until it was too late.”

As a new computing platform gaining momentum during this recession, cloud computing and many cloud-computing companies will likely fit the bill of producing industry-changing ideas and positive business results. A global study of CIOs, business and IT managers released last week indicates a 320-percent increase in planned use of cloud-computing solutions since the beginning of this year.

For example, consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented in days to quickly solve business problems:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such asTriCipher provide a single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress, and that capitalism is a “perennial gale of creative destruction.”

I think that the current gale is coming from the cloud; do you?