Computerworld Hong Kong: Cognizant’s Vice President of Infrastructure Services Writes About Accelerating Business with the Cloud Value Chain

“Yesterday’s speculation has become today’s reality that the growth in cloud adoption is accelerating innovation, scalability and business agility, resulting in inventive business models and business growth,” writes Nachiket Deshpande. “The Asia Pacific region is catching up fast in its overall pace of adoption with significant uptake of cloud services.” Excerpts:

“With highly virtualized infrastructure already in place, IT strategy is increasingly pivoted around cloud adoption for organizations. Cloud computing continues to mature at a rapid pace with many “as-a-service” offerings paving the way for the Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) model, which can be seen as the founding pedestal of the “vertical cloud”, the next version of cloud.

Considering that organizations are at different levels of business, technology and operational maturity and objectives, it is imperative to look at the cloud value chain in order to accelerate business and get it to a desired future state.

The cloud value chain takes a holistic approach to the business and market context today by embracing cloud as a central and integral part of the organizations’ path forward through cloud design, build, operations, automation and orchestration, as well as cloud-aligned service management.

As the cloud paradigm continues to break the rigidity of captive datacenters and empowers the business and IT teams, the current trend is to look beyond asset management.

Commoditization of hardware is passé while the consumption of infrastructure and platform as a service is soon becoming a thing of the past. The success of horizontal solutions in cloud has resulted in IT leaders thinking beyond these solutions. Their desire is now more about flexible financial models that can be exploited to experiment with new vertical avenues, such as banking and insurance.

As the XaaS model brews in the cloud, the underlying concept is expanding beyond the perceived boundaries. While XaaS is accelerating specific business functions horizontally or to some extent vertically, the need to put them together to achieve ultimate business value is still the mandate of IT leaders.

The newfound cloud thinking is spurring organizations to explore running their entire businesses on utility-based pricing models with complete abstraction of infrastructure, platform, code, and so on. 

Such drivers are enticing service providers to build the next version of the cloud—the “vertical cloud”. In this concept, core of the business application comes from cloud whereas customization forms organizational culture.

The competitive advantage for organizations will lie in how well they integrate and leverage the cloud value chain as a central part of the business in competing against “digital-native” and “born-in-the-cloud” organizations.”

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