<This is an outline for one of the chapters of my upcoming books.
My idea is to blog skeletal chapters, enrich the core story through subsequent research and interaction with readers.
Feel free to critique / rubbish>
One of the key requirements for a Speed Boat business model is your ability to focus on key aspects of business :
1. Focus on creating best products and Services for your customers - Build a possible mouse trap to let world beat a path to your home .
2. Focus on Providing best possible experience to your customers and hence create a great brand value for you.
Anything apart from the above is a distraction to management bandwidth.
Anything apart from the above should be dealt by experts preferably outside of your company.
If you really want to focus on the above two , you cannot be focusing your time on building massive server farms, ensuring all of them of updated with right patches and ensuring the cooling work la well.
This leads us rightly into the topic of Cloud Computing.
Broadly , the cloud is split into three specialised camps (some times they over lap depending upon what we talk about).
Camp A : Infra As A Service
This is where technicians ofter you virtualised / non virtualised servers, desktops , processing powers , storage etc. Key players being Amazon, Microsoft , IBM , RackSpace etc
Camp B : Platform As a Service
These are the guys who provide you platforms which are necessary to compose a business application but stop short of providing one but leave the choice to you.
Key examples are : Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, SFDC force.com etc
Camp C is a bit sophisticated. They provide , typically multi tenant , business applications that can be integrated / orchestrated into business processes .
Key examples are : SFDC and many many others.
So what are the things that a CIO of a this day don't need to worry about :
1. Servers, Storage and provisioning of these in a virtualised fashion
2. Operating and maintaining (patches) of these infrastructure
3. Scaling up and down based on business spikes is taken care
4. Capex of infrastructure has become a OPEX. You don't need to buy costly real estate and build Data Centers
5. Commoditised micro services (logging , metering , provisioning etc) - PaaS
6. Commonly used business functions (CRM) , mainly core functionalities
7. No need to worry constantly about ever changing technology
A typical SpeedBoat startup will have more than 90% of their time spent in towards creating newer functionalities while Super Tankers will be visiting remote corners to choose best site for their swanky Data Centers....
Cloud is not a hype anymore. It will help you to unbundle a critical but non core aspect of your business. Like how we don't manufacture electricity ourselves , don't produce water ourselves we will not invest heavily into infrastructure soon.
Cloud relieves time and bandwidth to focus on more important aspects of your business.
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