Identifying the applications you use that may be suitable to move to the cloud.
Neil Otto – Solution Manager
neil.otto@meritide.com
The Promise of Cloud Applications
The promise of Cloud Computing, Software as a Service, and On Demand Services is that you can move your in house application platforms to an outside vendor or service and increase availability of the applications while at the same time reducing the total cost of ownership and maintenance of those applications.
This strategy can be applied to several of the standard systems an organization may use to manage their business and can eliminate the cost and concerns related to maintaining these systems through hardware and software upgrades.
Application Areas Ready for the Cloud
There are several application areas that you can target right now to lighten your internal software and hardware footprint and reduce maintenance cost.
Communications and Collaboration
Your email system may be one of the biggest consumer of maintenance time and hardware resources in your infrastructure. Storage space, software and hardware upgrades, user issues, and remote access needs lead to a system that needs attention. Although the email system is mission critical, the services it provides are typically not proprietary to any business and can be addressed with any one of the many cloud and on demand offerings (Exchange Online, Microsoft BPOS, Google GMail for Business). By using pay as you go user based licensing, your costs are directly associated with the number of users and the amount of space you use. Upgrades and provisioning are handled by the provider and a first line of disaster protection is provided. Constant virus and SPAM protection at the server level are also part of the services. The system will also be available remotely without the need to configure firewalls, VPN, or mobile phone access.
You might also look at the way you are using your email system in your processes. You can evaluate if there are more effective ways to communicate and collaborate, such as using SharePoint for business processing and notification. You might look at replacing marketing email communications with your customers with more web based RSS feeds or blogs. If you are using email as a way to deliver content and marketing information you might benefit from more automation instead of developing complete systems of communication and collaboration based on email sends and replies.
Website, Intranet, and Extranets
If you are hosting your website, intranet, or a customer portal or extranet internally you can look at moving those out to the cloud and at the same time reduce bottlenecks associated with web publishing. If your website is not currently using a Content Management System (CMS) you can use the opportunity to re-evaluate and get your website into a managed CMS that will give you more control over adding and editing content. A few good options include DotNetNuke (DNN) which we have discussed in past blogs, which can be provided by hosting partners such as PowerDNN. There are also systems such as SquareSpace that provide a hosted CMS that can be used to build websites.
You can provide SharePoint based sales support or product support websites that include things like ticket tracking, document downloads, surveys, and event information using affordable hosting providers like Apps4Rent. The SharePoint collaboration features and built in templates can let you build a subsite for your customers to interact with you on product information like forms, product documentation, and FAQs in a way that is intuitive and easy to support.
These providers and options might also be a good solution to start websites (separate from your corporate website) that are used to promote specific product lines (microsites) or for your social networking or web communications strategies like blogging.
If you want to provide your own employee collaboration capabilities through SharePoint without the cost and maintenance requirements of hosting your own, you can use hosting options like SharePoint Online or Microsoft BPOS.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products are a big hit in the cloud application space. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online have allowed organizations to implement CRM based on a per user licensing model with no infrastructure investment. The applications can be customized to suit your business and they avoid becoming monolithic customized on premise applications. This eliminates many of the aspects of CRM implementations that lead to failures in CRM implementations of the past. The cloud based applications also make information available to a mobile sales force through a web interface that is available from public internet access or through mobile clients and devices like IPhones.
Ready by 2011
Within a year there will be additional application areas that you can target to continue a cloud strategy.
IT and Desktop Maintenance and Help Desk
Both Microsoft and BMC Software are working on systems that will provide IT with the capability to delivery software patches, virus protection, and help desk support through cloud based systems. These client management capabilities have the benefits of access from anywhere for clients and administrators and the lower cost of ownership through a client license model without the need for internal services and infrastructure. If you are looking to implement a more sophisticated help desk, client management process, or managed virus protection, these options should be considered before you look at on premise deployment and buildout.
Accounting and ERP
Accounting and ERP packages are moving to the cloud as well, following the success of the CRM on demand market. Microsoft has offerings through its partners and venders like NetSuite provide hosted ERP applications.
What’s Left?
After the application areas already listed are addressed, what is left will be custom applications or legacy applications that you have built or modified to the point where they cannot be replaced with off the shelf packages available in the cloud. You might also have business critical Access or Excel applications that fill in the gaps between your packaged applications.
For custom applications, you might consider hosting them or if you plan on replatforming or refactoring them, make sure you consider cloud base development platforms like Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s EC2, Google App Engine.
You can also look to reimagining these custom applications into SharePoint or xRM applications as we have discussed in two previous blogs - Is xRM Your Next Move from Access or Filemaker? and Say Goodbye to some Old Friends.
About Neil Otto -- As the Meritide Solution Manager and CTO, Neil Otto provides strategy and guidance to the Meritide organization and its clients. His area of expertise and experience relates to applying software and technology to address and solve business issues and create new business opportunities. He has worked within Meritide's Web Enablement, Open Source, and Microsoft Stack practices and provides senior business and technology architecture consulting for our clients.