Ice was once a precious commodity. In the 1800s, Frederic Tudor made a fortune shipping thousands of tons of ice across the globe. But the electric freezer and refrigerator brought an end to ice monopolies, and the ice-shipping industry disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
According to Bruce Von Maltitz, MD at 1Stream, this story proves that enterprises need to be resilient in reinventing themselves to avoid being replaced. In the past, huge monopolies and entire industries have boomed, only to disappear.
"The lesson is simple: no company is too large, too sophisticated or too powerful to fall," he says, adding that this is especially true in the ICT industry, particularly in the cloud.
The big players in the cloud space today - Dropbox, Skype, Salesforce.com - didn't exist 10 years ago, he points out. The reason the likes of Skype and Dropbox are successful is because they were born in the cloud, Von Maltitz continues. "They created technology for the cloud, in the cloud. The products the larger vendors and technology companies produced were never designed to operate that way."
Enterprises that are typically used to selling products that are simply sold, installed and plugged in with minimal assistance are struggling to meet customers' need for adaptability and hands-on service that is part and parcel of the hosted model, he says, quoting Mark Benioff of Salesforce: "It's called software as a service, not software sold in a box".
This, he says, raises the question: have the large companies lost the cloud? "The ones that are stuck in service delivery boxes certainly have. They aren't selling a true solution to a client's problem; they are selling products. It's a myopic view, comparable to selling large blocks of ice rather than meeting the need for having cold food and drinks on hand, even if meeting that need means changing the way you've always run your business," he says.
According to Von Maltitz, cloud companies that have entered and dominated the market didn't do so because they had large resources or a household name to back them, but because they responded to the need for flexible, affordable, scalable solutions in their respective markets.
"Enterprise companies have to rethink the way they approach the cloud, or they will find themselves firmly left behind in the Ice Age," concludes Von Maltitz.
Share