Enterprise SaaS Working Group: The cloud is ready for your enterprise, is your enterprise ready for the cloud?

Ryan Nichols

We're honored to be participating in this week's kickoff of the Enteprise SaaS Working Group, sponsored by Conformity. We'll be joined by CIOs, enterprise architects, analysts, and VP's of cloud computing from Dell, Initiate, Salesforce.com, the 451 Group, SuccessFactors, and Ingres.

The topic on the table is "what will it take for SaaS/cloud apps to become mainstream in the enterprise?" with deep dives on meaty topics like SaaS vs. Paas, SaaS suites vs. best-of-breed, and SaaS TCO, Security, and Management.

We're at a great stage in the industry's evolution that we're finally able to have a detailed, industry-level conversation on these topics without being overshadowed by the FUD-factor of "is SaaS enterprise-ready." The question is no longer "if", but "how." That's exactly what we're going to dig into in Wednesday's webinar.

More broadly, I think Simon Wardley at Canonical gets it right when he asserts that the question is no longer "is the cloud ready for the enterprise," but rather "is the enterprise ready for the cloud?"

That's certainly what we've seen in our work accelerating enterprise adoption of cloud computing-- making the most of cloud computing requires a fundamental changes in how companies interact with their internal staff, their partners, and their technology vendors. Our customer, Author Solutions, found that cloud computing enabled an entirely new, "long tail" business model. Another customer, Starbucks, found that cloud computing allowed them to digitally extend the 1:1 barista experience to millions of customers online. In both cases, the technology was the easy part.

My hope for the Enterprise SaaS Working Group is that we spend as much time talking about the changes required of the enterprise to make the most of cloud computing as we do talking about the changes required in the technology itself.

But first things first-- looking forward to a fantastic first webinar on Wednesday! If you're interested in learning more, register here....