Cloud Innovation and Transformation

⇨ Business focus on transformation requires a cloud-based platform for innovation

⇨ Cloud-based systems can begin software deployment within hours

⇨ Hyperscalers can connect corporate data sets with weather or trend data

Over the last few years, organizations had to adapt to both a changing marketplace and increasing customer expectations and requirements. Many had to accelerate existing plans or rapidly formulate new strategies to adjust to these scenarios. Some increasingly relied on cloud-based solutions and infrastructure. Cloud-based platforms provide access to capabilities like managing large data volumes, analytics tools for those volumes, and AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities that are not available internally. This is why organizations are exploring cloud-based platforms to support their innovation needs.

Beyond moving data to the cloud, organizations also want applications that provide additional insight from their data. Most organizations can use analytics, many other critical KPIs. But they often lack greater insight around that data. This is the functionality that hyperscalers can offer, connecting corporate data sets with weather or trend data provides more context to that information. For example, a company can determine that they sold more of a given item on a particular day because of weather or a sporting event. This type of comparison is much more complex and slower to perform without cloud-based systems – if not impossible.

Lastly, organizations must be able to accelerate the deployment of new systems and solutions. Historically, new projects require organizations to approve for capital expenditure, order systems from a provider, and schedule hardware deployment. This might take weeks or months before application installation could even begin. But with cloud-based systems, organizations can request compute capabilities and begin software deployment within hours. This can significantly accelerate systems and solutions deployment. This is crucial for organizational innovation plans.

All respondents indicated that a business focus on transformation requires a cloud-based platform for innovation, regardless of their organization’s annual revenue. However, respondents from organizations with revenue over $2 billion were much more likely to pursue a cloud-based platform for innovation (43%) compared to those with revenues below $2 billion (32%). Respondents were much more closely aligned on the demand for cloud-based platforms that provide greater insight, with 32% of those from large organizations indicating that is a factor behind their plans for innovation, compared to 28% of those from smaller organizations.