Cloud Value Chain
February 14, 2012, cloud connect conference, Santa Clara, CA—Jan Jackman from IBM talked about going to market and the value chain ecosystem. The cloud offers potential for great opportunities for change and business practice improvements, but can also become a black hole.
A recent internal IBM survey found that involvement with cloud infrastructure enhances the overall value chain and increases revenues. These changes also result in a change in the positioning in the value chain, and overall, become disruptive changes when applied with foresight. Good results require assembling compatible and complementary ecosystem partners.
The main types of companies in the ecosystem are software as a service, builders, infrastructure providers, other service providers, and technology creators. Success depends upon where you are in the chain and how well you have identified your own functions and those of your providers and users. The functions can be in pushing, managing, or servicing the various processes.
The solution is to manage life cycles and consultancies. The first piece of business is to test the applications in the public cloud without data to confirm operations, then to transfer the package in parcels into the final infrastructure. Add in the live data only after the testing has shown that the operating environment is stable and resilient. Run parallel operations until the cloud-based applications are fully tested. Simulate all known configurations and fault conditions before turning the full application and data set on.
Moving operations to the cloud changes the way you bring partners into the business and modifies the rate of change in the business. The resulting question is where you fit into the overall picture and understand your partners’ functions to best understand and use the cloud to make changes in your business.
