CLOUDY WITH AN INCREASING CHANCE OF SIMPLICITY

If you ask 10 people what the cloud is, you’ll likely get 10 different answers. Some view it as a vehicle for lowering IT costs. Others see it as a way to drive new levels of process efficiency, collaboration, and insight. But the most innovative organizations are embracing it to eliminate complexity from their business to Run Simple.

Just as consumers use social tools and networks to shop, share and consume better, companies are leveraging the automation, scale, and ubiquity of the cloud to further simplify the way complex business gets done.

With a few clicks, they can shop for goods and services, place and manage orders and pay for them through mobile devices. They can view and manage spend across all major categories and manage their entire workforce – temporary and full-time employees alike. And, they can engage customers across multiple channels – all through a single, connected platform.

Running Simple

The beauty of the cloud is that it can be many things to all businesses. With the right vendor, companies can mix public cloud applications and services, private cloud-managed services, and on-premise technology to meet their specific needs and extend their existing infrastructure or applications to enable new processes, gain new insights, and unlock new value. Cirque du Soleil is a classic example. The company began its cloud journey with the SAP small business (SMB) solution, Business One. As its business grew, it smoothly transitioned to SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and added cloud-based offerings from Concur and Ariba.

What’s the Secret to Success With the Cloud?

• Don’t look at the cloud to do just the same old thing, but with new technology. Rather, use it to expand your existing infrastructure and enable new processes, gain new insights, and drive entirely new engagement models with your customers, your employees, your supply chain, and your partners;
• Make sure you select a provider that can grow with your business, whether you intend to grow globally or just need to scale quickly, while expanding into new markets, with new products and across new industries;
• Don’t be forced to rip and replace.
• Invest in a cloud solution that can interoperate with – and expand upon – your existing infrastructure.

Business in today’s hyper-connected, real-time, global economy is complex. The solutions used to manage it shouldn’t be. There’s no doubt the cloud is among the most disruptive technologies of our day. But disruption fuels innovation. And innovation drives advantage. At the end of the day, companies that harness its power can cut through complexity and Run Simple.

Source: http://blogs.sap.com