Unfortunately or fortunately for Minnesota Vikings Quarterback Brett Favre, he faced a difficult struggle between 2006 and this season in deciding whether or not to retire. However, given Favre’s and the Vikings’ performance thus far, it appears that his string of decisions worked out well. One thing most of us can probably agree on is that Favre is fortunate to be able to change his mind and continue his career as a starting NFL quarterback. He is clearly one of the best.
Business and IT managers also face difficult decisions, especially in committing to multi-million or even multi-billion-dollar initiatives. One of their largest decisions is committing to specific on-premises enterprise software that requires high initial investments, multi-year implementations, costly customization, and confidence in the vendor’s future. These circumstances have led research and advisory firms such as ZapThink to question the future of single-vendor enterprise software, and argue that the best strategy is service-oriented architecture (SOA) and multiple cloud-based applications that use the services.
In a ZapFlash document, “Is there a Future for Enterprise Software?,” Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink argues that “dependence on a single product, single vendor for the entirety of a company’s operations is absolutely ludicrous in an IT environment where there’s no technological reason to have such dependencies. The more you depend on one thing for your success, the less you are able to control your future. Innovation itself hangs in the balance when a company becomes so dependent on another company’s ability to innovate.”
Enterprise architecture aside, cloud-based applications do make decision-making easier on several fronts, because they:
- Do not require long commitments and high initial licensing investments
- Can scale up or down quickly as needed to support business requirements
- Can be rolled out in days rather than years
- Can produce business value within days
- Do not require enormous investments in infrastructure to operate
Even if a company has considerable investments in single-vendor enterprise software, cloud-based applications can supplement those investments with many niche applications that would often take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to define, develop, configure, test, and implement with on-premises enterprise software. 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 reporting and predictive 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.
- Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
- Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such asTriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.
When faced with an enormous decision to commit to an uncertain future and millions of dollars with a single on-premises vendor, there may be a way to get better results faster and cheaper with enterprise cloud-based solutions and SOA. Best of all, SOA and cloud computing provide the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing business conditions and still succeed in ways you could never entirely predict or plan for, just like Brett Favre did.
How does your organization plan to implement enterprise cloud-based solutions and SOA to reduce risk and improve flexibility in decision-making?
No comments:
Post a Comment