Page 220 - 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

the cloud keeps production systems free from the vicissitudes
of end user experimentation. Other customers might join in
at a community site. In the middle of the night, two customers
who couldn’t resist trying one more thing might collaborate
in staging a breakthrough.
With a disruption, remember, neither the consumer nor

the company knows exactly how the disruptive technology
might be used. Giving the customer programmatic control over
certain resources produced by the company is commonplace
at companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Salesforce.com.
But many established companies are unfamiliar with how the
practice works (the controls have strict limits) or how it might
be employed safely to work for them. Services today are built

in software, and software as a service in the cloud is a new dis-
tribution method and economic model. Salesforce.com has
grown quickly and has proved that this technique works.
If early feedback makes any of these avenues appear prom-
ising, the company might take Christensen’s advice and create
a small unit with no responsibility other than to try to exploit
the new opening, with any returns applauded, whether they
contribute significantly to overall profits or not. If neither that
unit nor the competition gets anywhere with one avenue of

exploration, it can be abandoned without too much upheaval.
If, after a couple of failures, an avenue points the way to suc-
cess, the company will have ready-made expertise in its ranks
and will have made a wise investment.
Nor will success with the cloud necessarily come from the ap-
pointed team. Some line-of-business manager that you didn’t
know had any programming skills may learn enough PHP to

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