the Cloudy weather forecast

Disruptive businesses are the talk of the day. Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon's eCommerce are under the spotlight with business models eating out the offline ones. Most chatter is about their success in mass consumer reach, cost-saving strategies, and growth potentials. 

While the existing offline businesses struggle to find alternative ways to compete, reinvent, and survive against these disruptive online newcomers, a similar showdown is shaking the technology industry. 

A century ago, outsourcing, virtualization, data center co-location, and hosting was the town's game. Lowering costs and focusing on your core business was the narrative. The technologies started to relocate to the clouds while the underlying value story stayed the same. It is an iterative version of the same game, a nonrevolutionary evolution.

Dark clouds, heavy rain, flash floods are over the network, server, and storage hardware manufacturers. The end could easily lead to an unhappy one. Nevertheless, the journey will be a painful one for sure. The favorite narrative is the private and hybrid cloud strategy, silently promoting self-survival.

Weather forecast is clear skies for SaaS companies. Nibble incumbents' businesses partially or as a whole, leveraging the public cloud providers' reach to conquer the far lands with fewer vessels and crew. While the dead dolphin theory suggests only a handful will continue to float over the clouds, there is a safety net. Incumbent technology companies are out for a shopping spree. Hardware manufacturers will shop them as part of their genius transformation effort that makes as much sense as theology. Elder SaaS siblings will acquire to bump their top-line revenues. Public cloud providers will be interested in the ones that increase the stickiness of their platform offerings.

Forecast for enterprise software companies is partially cloudy. While some of the existing software subscription models, if not under the hood technologies, may be well suited for the cloud, their current operation mode is the hump and the bump. They say old habits are hard to shake off; they may be right.

For overall enterprise business software companies, washing the clouds rather than settling in is the current prominent play; resistance is futile, one might say, competing SaaS offerings are closing the gap fast. For infrastructure software companies, well, wearing comfortable hiking shoes and carrying an umbrella could be a smart move as that is the organic expansion field for the public cloud providers.

Incumbent technology companies are like aircraft carriers. Slow to maneuver, but smaller flotillas can't slow or sink them once they are on route. The solution is a straight line between quitting hanging on the old revenue streams and bootstrapping before the total value is still worth more than bits.