Page 222 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

serve as a low-cost design platform. Instead of equipping highly
paid designers, customers might come to the cloud and use
advanced software design systems that are resident there. The
software would incorporate the rules and regulations and best
practices of, say, building a house, and allow the user to try to
design a highly customized model without an architect look-

ing over her shoulder. Then a specialist product management
firm would figure out how to produce the product. Instead of
trying to sell something to people who don’t necessarily want
it, you’ve enlisted potential customers to design something that
they’re willing to pay for. Perhaps a business gains only a few
customers from such a process, but it has still gathered a core
of paying customers, plus a mother lode of information on

what your potential customers are interested in—free market
research.
A cloud computing platform can also serve as a staging
ground for a marketplace, with talented outsiders being
brought into the market for periodic contributions through a
screening process. A variety of market transactions take place
in this vertical cloud, because the independent companies are
united in their goals, but not in their corporate structure. The
wide-ranging group doesn’t need to be inside the same com-

pany because all financial transactions take place in the shared
cloud infrastructure and are auditable there. We are rapidly
moving toward being able to monitor, audit, and manage all
events in a given software infrastructure, if we choose to do so.
For example, the day may come when government regu-
lators make all mortgage lending take place within a vertical
“mortgage cloud” where each step of the process could be

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