Shift In Focus: Economic Downturn Requires Companies to Innovate

Last week at the Mid-Size Enterprise Summit (hosted by Everything Channel), Geoffrey Moore touched upon the subject of "innovate to take market share away from competitors."

According to ChannelWeb’s article, Moore said, “a down economy compels companies to cut costs and focus on maintenance and other mission-critical functions rather than spend money on innovation and projects that come with a possible degree of failure attached…However, many of those mission-critical functions -- tasks that are necessary but provide little overall value to the organization -- can and should be outsourced so businesses can further invest in their core, and innovate in a way that propels the company forward.”

That’s the philosophy that we've been educating our clients on. The down economy is actually the time for businesses to start investing in new technologies -- such as cloud and hosted infrastructure -- which would ultimately free up staff and resources that could be allocated to innovation budgets.

Specifically with Pointivity’s iTOS (Integrated Outsourced Solution), it’s an investment into IT centralization, standardization, and resource virtualization. iTOS is now widely perceived by our clients as a business strategy that helps to simplify IT and streamlines their business process enabling more designate resources and time to stay ahead instead of trying to catch up to competitors.

Moving forward, IT’s focus should not be so much on transactional systems, but enablement capabilities, from “computing” to “communications and collaboration.”

Is iTOS right for you? Talk to us.

Salesforce Chases After Cloud With Force

Salesforce announced the addition of Force.com, which provides a hosted infrastructure for customers to run websites in Salesforce cloud. They're also going to provide the building blocks to integrate with business applications when everything is available in 2009.

It sounds like they're trying to add value to their offerings via the cloud hype while expanding their product reach further with Facebook and Amazon partnership.

Moving forward, Salesforce will continue to be under pressure from Oracle, SAP and especially Microsoft's new Azure, which is pretty much the same offering. Not to mention Microsoft is working hard to replace SaaS with S+S, it's amazing how Salesforce expects to pass US$1 billion in annual revenue for the first time but its profit margin remains extremely slim.

The IT value stack is getting squeezed by players of all sizes trying to reshape the changing roadmap in IT. As we continue to see acceleration in the cloud hype there is also a fundamental shift in how applications are used and delivered but until the general perception adapts to the cloud idea, I still believe in the hybrid model that will emerge as the real solution to the future of SaaS.

Microsoft Azure: Their Entrance Into Cloud Computing

Monday this week Microsoft launched their new cloud computing AZURE. Billed as "an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers," which explains why they were shipping massive number of servers for months now.

Azure is designed to provide an "operating system" and a set of developer services that will enable a broadening of the Microsoft platform from on-premise to the Cloud. It should be noted that Azure is positioned as a platform similar to Google Apps and just like before Microsoft is the last to the game and will have their impact. In addition, Microsoft is to provide hosted Windows Servers with full Admin access. Supposedly you can choose how much RAM/CPU you want. (2009 release)

Get ready as Microsoft continues to eat up the technology layers from application to platform, to infrastructure. Stay tune for more information later.