We recently had a meeting with a customer to talk about the future of their mail systems - half the company are on Domino and the rest on various Exchange systems (not integrated).

"The Cloud" was flagged as an area of interest because fundamentally the business want to shift away from the cost and overhead of maintaining their various distributed thick client mail systems, and free up time and money to focus on real business issues. The key point for me in the conversation was that in contemplating "The Cloud" as a solution, what they were in fact saying was that they had made the mental shift to say that mail can be a commodity that is primarily browser based.

Once we make that leap the world's your oyster. What does it matter which specific vendor / product you end up with, as long as the system provides the functionality and service that the business requires at an acceptable price level?
With the acceptance of "The Cloud" we are able to discuss centralised hosted/managed solutions (private cloud), switching from "everyone has a client" to browser access + web enabled applications whilst still retaining the flexibility of local clients for specific roles.

While some will end up in a LotusLive/Google/Microsoft cloud solution, a lot of organisations will opt for the "private cloud" approach. They will have their systems centralised, managed and effectively outsourced whilst retain a level of control over where their data is held and who/how/when it  can be accessed and modified.

So, far from being a "game killer" the Cloud can actually open up new opportunities and provide the catalyst for customers to consider new approaches to traditional solutions. As for our customer, we are looking to work with them on identifying their business requirements first and then help them select the correct solution.

Comments (0) Peter Smith November 21st, 2009 22:05:10