Are Industry Clouds the key to crossing the chasm for cloud adoption?
Sanjiv Gossain
General Manager & Head of EMEA, Verizon Business | Don’t just connect your business. Make it even smarter | Advisor & Mentor.
Crossing The Chasm
As I mentioned in an earlier note, the cloud wave has well and truly arrived [1]. Organizations are rapidly moving to the cloud and in many cases are working with more than one public cloud provider, as well as using private cloud and SaaS vendors. Using Geoffrey Moore’s famous ‘Crossing the Chasm’ model of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle [2], we are squarely in the early adopter phase for the move to the cloud, and yet to cross the chasm before we reach the mainstream. Here I am referring to the use of cloud throughout the ‘technology stack’ – for infrastructure to data to applications etc. The first part of the mainstream is the early majority, who are the pragmatists and adopt a technology after its benefits have been proven by early adopters. One emerging aspect that will help cloud technology usage in the enterprise cross the chasm are Industry Clouds.
An Industry Cloud is a set of tools, services, applications and configurable frameworks designed to implement common use-cases and processes in an industry, on a native cloud platform. It can be created from public cloud infrastructure services and capabilities, interfacing with 3rd party applications and APIs.??It is expected that they will be important in the future as they can more concretely support industry specific business workflows.
The hyperscalers - Microsoft, Google Cloud and AWS - have largely been adding more and more ‘horizontal’ non-industry specific services on top of their platforms for customers and are now investing in ‘vertical’ industry-specific services and capabilities. The verticalization of cloud is a recent evolution of the existing strategy of public cloud providers and one that will mean they need to add industry knowledge, workflows, data, and support industry specific use cases. Microsoft, Google and AWS each have their own approaches to providing more industry context, content and support for industry workflows on top of their infrastructure. Microsoft has advantages in this space with its experience and longevity in the enterprise, and software tools developed or acquired over the years such as Dynamics 365, whole AWS and Google are investing rapidly in industry features.
The growth of Industry Cloud
Each of the hyperscalers has indicated they need to verticalize more in their approach to cloud. Microsoft is building industry cloud platform for select industries, while Google and AWS are taking a more component solution based approach. Let’s look at Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare[3]?as an example -??this cloud provides support for common processes in healthcare with pre-built software to configure for key activities such as improving patient engagement (marketing, onboarding, scheduling, etc), enable healthcare team collaboration (using collaborative tools on Teams, scheduling visits, collaboration on documents, etc), and improving clinical insights (clinical analysis by connecting health records through APIs, bringing health data together etc), amongst others. In this way a health care provider can quickly get on board with cloud based software and get the benefits of software-as-a-service sooner, knowing that the provider recognises the key processes and key challenges specific to their industry (e.g. protecting sensitive health data).
Similar industry clouds can be offered and built for different industries supporting key processes and using the suite of tools Microsoft has (Dynamics 365, Azure APIs, Bots, etc) and also can leverage integration with 3rd party systems such as medical records systems for Healthcare Cloud[4], or payments systems for Financial Services Cloud[5]?etc.
Up to this point, as of mid-November 2021, the Google and AWS approach to industry solutions has not been to build a dedicated industry cloud, but to provide a set of solutions to particular industry challenges or use cases for select industries, leveraging tools and frameworks in their stable or through ecosystem partnerships[6]. For example, in healthcare Google Cloud has a partnership with Amwell for virtual care[7], and they are planning to support open standards design (e.g. FHIR, DICOM) through their Cloud Healthcare API, and leverage their strengths in data to expand data sharing across the healthcare ecosystem. They have comparable initiatives in select other industries taking the ecosystem and solution approach.
For true adoption in certain industries such as healthcare and banking where data and privacy are more critical and in geographies where issues of data sovereignty and security must be addressed, cloud providers need to ensure these are available to customers in their respective jurisdictions. On this path we see announcements of sovereign clouds, such as those announced for France and Germany[8], and other initiatives to address concerns on cloud and make the cloud more attractive for the mainstream. Security is another area that has been a limiter to adoption, but that too is being addressed. Interestingly in a recent survey[9]?of 500+ cloud decision makers 54% agreed that cloud providers can offer superior security compared to an organization’s own data center.
As more enterprise software companies make their software available on the cloud (e.g. SAP, Oracle) they too are starting to embrace industry cloud and take their modules for an industry and make them available on the cloud and provide solutions for common workflows in that industry.?Core processes examples are such as omni-channel commerce, customer care, product and service launch, etc. and will depend on the industry.
The growth of enterprise vendors into the cloud, the increasing number of higher level services offered on the cloud by hyperscalers, plus industry solutions being available on the cloud (from hyperscalers and start-ups) is all making for an exciting move to Industry-centric build outs of the cloud.
The Whole Product
Going back to Moore’s model, one of the keys to a technology gaining widespread adoption and ‘crossing the chasm’ is to provide a ‘whole product’, which is simply defined as “everything required to assure that the target customers can fulfil their compelling reason to buy"[10]. The early majority, who are pragmatists, want?everythingthey need to deploy the product which is the core product plus other attributes customers want such as additional services, monitoring tools, integration capabilities, etc. The Industry Cloud - either the overall industry cloud defined and built by Microsoft, or the solution based approach taken thus far by Google and AWS could be the core of the whole product, and coupled with additional services and attributes will make the cloud compelling for the majority of customers.
Benefits of an Industry Cloud
It is attractive for those organizations looking to benefit from the move to the cloud for lower cost, increased flexibility, better agility and faster speed of implementation, but are not able to design and develop their own services, and yet still want to get the value of moving their IT to the cloud. In addition to the generic benefits of cloud, Industry Cloud services can provide many operational and near-operational tasks which enables the organization to be more efficient, and focus more energy and investment on differentiating services, rather than just keeping the basic services running.
Industry clouds will benefit from the rapid growth of cloud-based software start-ups and new ventures that address a specific scenario or part of a business process, enterprise software companies moving to cloud and the verticalization of services being built by the hyperscalers. The key will be dependent on how these can work together or be integrated together.?
领英推荐
Industry cloud solutions can be more appealing given the acute talent shortage most organizations are facing today with many unable to hire or develop their own cloud talent pool. The current shortage of talent and expertise in cloud infrastructure, data and AI that businesses face means many businesses are looking to pre-defined processes to provide the majority of what they need, and can utilize a small squad or couple of squads to design and build their own modifications and adjustments to core elements of an industry cloud.
One of the common themes that emerges from my discussion with customers need for more industry specific parameters when moving workloads to cloud and then being able to leverage those parameters in execution of workflows. In Data and AI workloads as an example, we have a number of clients who are moving data from legacy environments onto the cloud - BigQuery on Google for example, and the challenge is that once the data has been moved they need to use it to start generating insights, and this is where industry processes need to incorporate cloud workflows to enable the use of data in the process. An additional set of capabilities and parameters in the services specific to an industry problem could speed things up here for customers.
Industry cloud may in future benefit from the network effects that open up as more enterprises adopt the technology and the platform. As adoption increases and more enterprises use an industry cloud, they could see more innovation in the ecosystem – either from start-ups solving unique problems or niches in that industry or from other key businesses in their ecosystem also joining the cloud to create more value. One possible future scenario is that it becomes more expensive and difficult for business if they are not part of an Industry Cloud. That business may not be able to fully participate in the ecosystem of their industry, potentially face higher costs for integration and collaboration with partners, and possibly miss out on innovation and new ideas.??We are not near such a scenario but it is one possible future pathway for industry clouds.?
So what can you do Monday?
Industry clouds and industry solutions on cloud appear to be the next stage in evolution for cloud and an important part of increasing adoption. So, what can you do on Monday? It is worth exploring the industry specific solutions and capabilities that your cloud provider(s) has in their portfolio, and also the ecosystem that they are developing and how that maps to address your business challenges and opportunities. Mapping these capabilities and ecosystem plans to your current pain points and the needs of your organization can help identify opportunities to execute pilots or proof of concepts to assess the viability of Industry Cloud in your arena and for your business. It’s essential to set tangible targets for return on investment for these pilots, and then look to assess, learn and build further.
References
[1]?https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/surfing-cloud-wave-part-1-2-sanjiv-gossain/
[2]?Crossing The Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, by Geoffrey A. Moore, Harper Business, 1991.?
[3]?https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/healthcare/configure-cloud-for-healthcare
[5]?https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/financial-services/microsoft-cloud-for-financial-services
[6]?Google Cloud Platform Industry Strategy, IDC Report #US47639721, May 2021.
[10]?https://chasminstitute.com/Blogs/tabid/288/Post/1691/Steve-Jobs-Master-of-the-Whole-Product
Excellent article Sanjiv
Cloud is more than infrastructure. Few years Cloud offered IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), now Cloud offers PAAS, SAAS, MLAAS, IOT, DevOps and many more on subscription basis with pay as you use models. Good write up on Cloud and it’s potential Sanjiv Gossain.