Businesses should not worry they’ve missed the cloud boat, as it will be a key driver of enterprise growth for years to come.
That's according to IBM’s CTO in Europe, John McLean, who told journalists at the Cloud World Forum in London today that a “new breed” of business is emerging.
“We are still at the beginning of a journey,” he said. “Cloud is changing the way businesses interact with their users and business partners like never before.”
To take advantage of the cloud, he added, companies need to increase collaboration between their IT departments, their business strategists and their core developers.
All three roles, argues McLean, are starting to merge as the needs for mobile and social cloud operations increase.
What IBM calls “composable business” – a building block approach to cloud strategy – will be the way that most firms move forward into a future dominated by the success that cloud can bring.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re IBM, a 100-year old company or born on the web and never used a physical server – staying ahead of the curve is really the name of the game,” McLean continued.
The cloud is giving people the ability to choose and match the best assets available to the best jobs at hand, according to McLean, and gives developers access to a robust set of tools and service compositions. IT managers, too, benefit from self-optimising environments and an ability to automate complex processes.
David Moss, HPC solutions manager at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, agreed: “The cloud will help everyone change.”
“It costs Jaguar £500,000 to run a physical crash test on all of their new vehicles. Using cloud-based high performance computing, it costs them just £12 to do a similar test using a data-based simulation.”
“A hybrid cloud world is the future,” added McLean. “The question you have to ask [when deciding to adopt cloud or not] is: ‘do I want to be a Blockbuster or a Netflix?’”
