A Tornado is Coming from the Cloud

In the movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy suffers a head injury during a tornado and is catapulted, with her house and dog, Toto, to the magical Land of Oz, where she has many adventures and cleanses the land of two wicked witches. In the business book, “Inside the Tornado,” author Geoffrey Moore describes the tornado as a period of exponential growth for new companies and technologies as the market tips in their favor. Moore uses the “Land of Oz” metaphor to describe the spectacular, “magical,” rapid growth that new companies and technologies achieve after they cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream market. Read the “Land of Oz” and “Crossing the Chasm” chapters of “Inside the Tornado” here, thanks to Google Books!

In a recent post on TechCrunch, “The Coming Tornado: Cloud in the Enterprise,” Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of cloud content management provider Box.net, argues that cloud computing is ready to go inside the tornado of mainstream adoption in enterprise computing. I think he is right, because several funnel clouds have already touched down to positively change the computing landscape at high-profile enterprises.

For example, last year Los Angeles County approved a $7.25 million deal to move its 30,000 employees to Google Apps, while global electrical engineering and electronics powerhouse Siemens signed a deal to roll out SuccessFactors software-as-a-service human resources solution to 420,000 users in 80 countries and in 20 languages. Last month, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft announced they would spend $250 million to co-develop cloud computing systems, while IBM announced what it says is the biggest cloud deal to date: Panasonic will port more than 300,000 employees, partners, and suppliers to IBM’s LotusLive online collaboration system. Also last month, Salesforce.com announced record quarterly revenue and Google’s profit more than quintupled in the fourth quarter 2009 to $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, from $382 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago. Gartner forecasted last month that, by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. That prediction follows Gartner’s listing of cloud computing as the top strategic technology for 2010.

If we are now moving inside the tornado to the Land of Oz with enterprise adoption of cloud computing, we, like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” have a few “wicked witches” to destroy in the chasms of compliance, security, privacy, and interoperability. However, just like Dorothy found fast friends in the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow in the Land of Oz, we have seasoned IT professionals at vendor, customer, and research organizations with the courage, heart, and intelligence to help us cross those chasms; follow the yellow brick road to success; and build better information systems to support the new generation of mobile information workers and agile organizations in the cloud.

Consider these magical cloud-based solutions that are experiencing mainstream enterprise adoption inside the tornado in the Land of Oz:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need 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 brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• 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 as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

What is your yellow brick roadmap of success with enterprise solutions in the cloud? How can cloud-based applications help you reach the Emerald City of optimized business performance and revenue growth?