Industry Clouds - Market Expectations

Introduction

In addition to clients, a variety of other players are likely to be interested in industry clouds. Those include Cloud Service Providers (CSP) who provide cloud services in many shapes and forms, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) who provide software to their clients in a specialized industry or different industries on cloud, and System Integrators (SI) that deliver integrated solutions to their clients using a collection of software and cloud capabilities. Industry Subject Matter Experts (SME) are absolutely part of the players who can act as independent consultants or be part of any of the other players mentioned. The orchestration of the role of each player to form a compelling and useful industry cloud offering is certainly industry cloud product managers who also can be on the side of CSP, ISV, or SI.

Regardless of to where product managers belong, clients have high expectations of industry clouds that go beyond today's standard public clouds. Before we get into those expectations, it is useful to look at industry clouds as an emerging technology. Although it is a collection of other existing (and other emerging) technologies, positioning "industry clouds" itself as an emerging technology helps us understand adoption and evolution aspects of it. In 2001, industry clouds were mentioned under the "Accelerating growth" theme of "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies". That Gartner article expects industry clouds to reach plateau in 5-10 years which gives room for further adoption and innovation along the way. This requires contributions from the different players discussed earlier in their respective areas of interest and expertise. Moreover, organizations that choose to adopt industry clouds need to be aware of the fact that it is an emerging technology despite of having individual constituting components that are mature and proven.

Market Expectations

Given all of the above, you can think of market expectations of industry clouds as add-ons to what is currently offered by the variety of cloud technologies available in the market today. Following are some discussion points for consideration.

Focussed Service Catalog

Industries develop affinity towards groups of services that deem useful for their type of business. The role of industry clouds is to avail such services in their catalogs. Preferably, those would come with guidance on best practices and relevant use cases depicting their use in the particular industry of focus. Needless to say, services could be of technology capability or business application nature as long as it is relevant to and useful for the industry.

Integrated Industry Services

This can be looked at as the digital equivalent of suppliers in traditional business. Industry clouds are expected to avail services from various parties to complements their service catalog. Good example of those could be payments, logistics, or any other type of services that can naturally be outsourced in the realm of the industry of focus.

Adequate Pricing Model

For some industries, it is no longer sufficient to keep the financial discussion at high level CAPEX versus OPEX as it used to be in the early days of cloud computing. Service pricing should take industry-relevant preferences into consideration. Considering the likes of commitment-based, usage-based pricing, or combinations of both with other fine-grained pricing options could make an industry cloud, or at least certain services more compelling to adopters of industry cloud. Schemes that are specific to industries such as "per sale" or "per transaction" can also be a useful tool to consider.

Instrumented Compliance

Compliance has been always one of the top CxO priorities over the past years. It came as no surprise that compliance was one of the top 4 characteristic sustainability approaches according to IBM CEO study published this month. The role of industry clouds is to help their adopters by design to be compliant. This is to offload a significant burden off their shoulder. Whether or not they have skills, resources, and time to address compliance requirements for their industries, it would be a major area of saving for their business if compliance is fully or partially was taken care of by the industry cloud they use.

Flexible Architectural Options

Different industries have different requirements. This requires industry clouds to provide a range of architecture delivery options. Relevant points can be around:

• Hybrid cloud to cover the need to locate applications and data as needed either on-premise, on a public cloud, or on a hybrid architecture comprising both.
• Multicloud architecture to enable adopters of industry clouds to pick and choose what suits their requirements out of what is available from different service providers based on their needs and constraints.
• SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS service delivery models to be able to address the requirements at each level of them while giving industry clouds adopters a chance to optimize and fine-tune their use of cloud.

Enabled Innovation

In the context of industry clouds, innovation is looked at from the angle of the ability for adopter to disrupt and differentiate within their industry. Another angle would be reduction of IT expenditure and improving operational excellence.

Alliances as a Key Enabler

As discussed earlier, the notion of industry clouds is a team sport where different players can/should make their own contribution. It is essential for industry clouds to operate in such a way that allows CSPs, ISVs, SIs, as well as industry groups and SMEs to continuously collaborate on maintaining and improving their industry cloud. Regardless of which party leads and orchestrates that collaboration, technology and business model should be designed to make it possible, profitable, and sustainable to all participants.

Conclusion

Industry cloud is there to stay for several years to come based on increasing demand on industry-focussed cloud services. CSPs, ISVs, and SIs along with industry groups are the stewards of evolving general-purpose cloud services and software intro something meaningful to industry consumers.