The Business Impact of Cloud Computing

Extracted 07SEP2011 from http://www.accenture.com/us-en/outlook/Pages/outlook-online-2011-business-imp...

New research from the London School of Economics and Accenture—based on a survey of 1,035 business and IT executives, as well as in-depth interviews with more than 35 service providers and other stakeholders—finds that the cloud will have a strong near-term impact on the majority of organizations. Twenty percent of respondents are already using cloud capabilities for a variety of services, including corporate email, websites, storage and customer relationship management. Similar numbers plan to make the transition in the next 18 months—a doubling of cloud usage in a very short timeframe.

Two-thirds of business and IT executives participating in our survey see the cloud as a business service and an IT delivery model that drives innovation in organi¬zations. Half of the executives see it as a new technology platform that can transform organizational forms.

Impact 1: The importance of the customer experience... Quantity, performance, value and quality are the four most important metrics. However, “softer” metrics—characteristics such as responsiveness, assurance and empathy—will become increasingly important in the new business and IT environment.

Impact 2: The shift from products to services... depends on two things. The first is the degree to which clients and suppliers can work together to identify the new business service possibilities created by the imaginative deployment of cloud-based technologies, and then deliver on them. The second factor is the role of service integrators in... offerings that can be experienced as relatively straightforward business services.

Impact 3: Reconfiguration of the supply industry... This scenario is based on the likelihood of an increasingly diverse and dynamic supplier community, organized along three principal value trajectories to manage different levels of complexity...

Customers are becoming much more ambitious about wanting not only IT operational benefits from the cloud, but also business process and market innovations. These will only be possible by tapping more effectively into brain power, wherever it exists in the supplier and solutions ecosystem.