Sourcing reinvented: cloud supply chain and spend management
If the future is a networked world, then we may well find that the future belongs to sourcing vendors. No other category of vendors has had its landscape transformed so fundamentally by the advent of the Web, to the extent that leading vendors such as Concur and Ariba took early decisions to wholly rearchitect their [...]
Cloud providers working with big data
What does big data mean for cloud providers? This is the topic under discussion at a EuroCloud UK meeting next week. This blog post is both a reflection on the topic as well as a taster for the event itself, which has an interesting and knowledgeable line-up of speakers — more details on that below [...]
All together now: cloud collaboration, social and docs
In the emerging enterprise application landscape, collaboration is the business activity most transformed by cloud. The revolution in outcomes is far greater than those wrought by earlier technology-driven advances in global teamwork, such as the telephone, air travel and satellite communications. The Web is the first medium that provides a unified platform for every form [...]
Son of CRM: cloud sales, marketing and service in 2013
The name’s the same, but this is not the CRM your forefathers knew. Back in the client-server era, enterprise computing focused almost exclusively on automating internal systems. Today, all the innovation is happening at the edge of the enterprise, automating external interactions with prospects, customers, partners and more in the quest for what I’ve called [...]
ERP, RIP? Cloud financials and revenue management in 2013
What’s the future for ERP in the cloud, if it has one at all? I heard a disarming admission last summer from the CEO of a company that aggressively markets itself as “the #1 cloud ERP software suite.” NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson told a gathering of industry analysts at the company’s SuiteWorld 2012 conference that [...]
Tech-hugging eurocrats imperil innovation puppy
Europe needs growth and cloud computing has a role to play. But are policy makers too eager for rapid results? An event later this month may yield some answers.
Ambivalence in Europe and the cloud
It strikes me that the UK’s attitude to Europe has a lot in common with many IT people’s feelings about cloud computing. Many Brits seem happiest about Europe when it’s at arms-length — useful for occasional visits and an important source of business, but not to be trusted closer to home. IT feels the same [...]
Living with iPad
Just before Christmas I joined in with the iPad crowd. The last straw was an XBRL event at ICAEW back in November when 5 of my colleagues who were speaking or supporting Twinfield at the show all had iPads and I didn’t. I started to look seriously at the tablet concept to see how it [...]
Cloud computing (still) needs a bill of rights
Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing: “If a provider can terminate its service that easily, then it is doing exactly [...]
Time to reveal cloud’s silver upside
Vendors should focus more on promoting the business benefits of cloud. We should not be spending all of our time on the defensive, letting objections about security, reliability and governance dominate the conversation.
