To Justify Microsoft Online- few thoughts?

Microsoft Online Services provide enterprises with subscription-based Microsoft-hosted online services that offer access to rich communication, collaboration, and productivity applications from anywhere. The benefits are not limited to simplified software subscription with Microsoft’s commitment on availability and security but also extend access to services rendered by Microsoft’s latest business productivity software.

Let’s have a review of the areas within your business where you gain potential by adding Microsoft online services and hence justify the investments within an enterprise.

Latest technology always – Any new technology / software launches by the technology vendors justify the overall product / platform efficiency and productivity thereby maximizing the value of investments for the adaptors. The services rendered through Microsoft online are backed by the latest and most efficient software from Microsoft’s stable thereby guaranteeing anytime anywhere secure access and seamless integration and interoperability to coexist with other business productivity applications within the enterprise. This also eliminates the need to have periodic software and service updates to stay current and more productive.

Cost – the cost advantage what can be leveraged subscribing to these services are multifold. Prima facie it helps reduce the capex (capital expenses) and opex (operational expenses) for enterprises by eliminating the need to procure / own IT infrastructure assets (hardware / Space / Software licenses) and the trained specialists resources for management. More over it brings in predictability to your monthly outflow with options to lock the price for a particular duration based on the contractual agreements.

Agility – The challenge for IT to be more agile to the business requirements can be well addressed by the model of subscribing to more when its needed rather than investing upfront based on anticipated future growth.

Secure - Backed by efficient process and huge investments from Microsoft for the Best-of-breed data centers hosting latest servers and other networking devices, they are being operated based on industry best practices. Data security standards are the maintained at the highest level for data transfer and storage from the data centers to the end point devices.

Support – Microsoft as a part of their online services guarantees support by their world class support team who are fully trained and ready to provide help and directions where even and whenever it is required.

Microsoft’s strength really lies with the depth and breadth of their partners with guaranteed delivery in case of business value of services you subscribe to or the support required post subscription. The partners are well enabled to help enterprises in choosing and developing a solution which fits to the specific requirements.

What’s next big for enterprises on cloud?

Let’s start with a very positive note on the future of Cloud computing adoption based on a recent report from Gartner. Gartner report says that business spending on software as a service (SaaS) will rise 22% in 2009 to $9.6 billion. This undeniably is a big relief to all the large cloud players and enablement community who are bullish on the service revenues projected in their business plans.

Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, said,

“The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets as tighter capital budgets in the current economic environment demand leaner alternatives … and interest for platform as a service and cloud computing grows. "
"Adoption of the on-demand deployment model has grown for nearly a decade, but its popularity has increased significantly within the last five years. Initial concerns about security response time and service availability have diminished for many organizations. As SaaS business and computing models have matured, adoption has become more widespread.”

So where is this going to come from? Are enterprises still experimenting with the cloud? While we all agree that salesfoce.com has been a huge success on the cloud within the enterprises, what could be the next big business applications on the cloud post this?

Sharon continues

“Many factors are driving adoption of SaaS, including the benefits of rapid deployment and rapid ROI, less upfront capital investment, and a decreased reliance on limited implementation resources."

The latest mandate for the CIO’s and their IT strategists is to balance the allocation of their sparse IT budget to maintain the existing IT assets and to invest in latest technologies to prepare employees with modern communication and collaboration capabilities. All new investments in IT should generate a high return on investment with predictable cost models without compromising the end user productivity. There are also thoughts of easing the existing management and operations burden of their own IT staffs for them to focus more on identifying areas of driving the business.

Given the scenario is the decision going to be simple? It is not as IT can’t afford anything which could lead to unplanned downtime or errors or compromise on the data security and compliance. But what is the way to start in the short term without any compromise and enjoy the benefits of rapid deployment and rapid ROI ?

Enterprise messaging and other business productivity suites (real time communications or the instant messaging, interactive web /video conferencing, intranet sites for document sharing and collaboration) are coming out amongst the initial choice for the enterprises. Major cloud players like Microsoft and Google have already matured offering in this space to cater to these requirements to replace the current on premises software within the enterprises performing these functions today.

These can also be integrated with other software’s /applications within the enterprises with ease and provide a streamlined experience to the end users. They also guarantee interfaces for simplified management while providing high availability and completely secure to comply with the enterprises norms and requirements.

To continue..

Evolution of enterprise IT Infrastructure..

Let’s have short preview of where IT infrastructure exists within enterprises today and how they are being managed.

It all started with the entire setup available within owned closed rooms and being called as available in premise. Most of the enterprises still consider this as the best option as they have a complete control and ownership of what they have invested in. While the smarter ones started thinking of the issues around management and operations, outsourcing evolved within the infrastructure. Initially the focus was around supplementing their own staffs from external outsourcing providers, the model evolved with ownership of staff to even Infrastructure assets being made available within the enterprises by the outsourcing providers.

A more efficient model evolved when enterprises were not able to bear the worries around the cost of owning the land, building and availability of reliable power and network. Colocated facilities helped enterprises to overcome these while benefiting from efficiencies and scale which some of the collocation providers could offer. Most of the large infrastructure outsourcing providers offers the collocation facility where even the management and operations being offered on shared services model to bring in efficiencies of scale.

Hosting was one of the Big leaps for the enterprises to completely offload their IT infrastructure asset ownership and management to other providers in this space. It even matured over the years offering different variants (Single tenant, multi tenancy) to enterprises to choose from based on the security and integration requirements and business criticality. Service levels were defined and tied to penalties to ensure availability of this infrastructure and any further sizing to address the growth of enterprises were managed efficiently by the provider.