There is not one word that has been more thrown around the past 10 years than “Cloud.” What is the cloud… nobody knows? Software companies have pivoted all their development resources to it, big tech companies are fighting each other to host solutions in their cloud and customers are trying to understand why moving from on-premise systems to the cloud through digital transformation is the right move.
The key players in cloud today are Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. These companies have invested billions into their data centers with the plan of moving every software solution into their clouds. In fact, in sales conversations, one of the top questions being asked by customers in a discovery is, “what cloud are you in?” Then they give bragging rights to CIOs amongst their peers by saying, “oh we’re in GCP or AWS.” Cloud companies not only provide SaaS business options, but IaaS is now becoming a very popular option. Why are these companies focused on creating a superior cloud business and why are software companies looking to offer their solution in a SaaS model? Simple, the TAM for cloud computing is $482 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. This encompasses business processes, platform, infrastructure, software, management, security, and advertising services delivered by public cloud services. Imagine all the core businesses, spin off companies, consultants, and developers globally that are after their share of that revenue.
Of course, public clouds come with a little risk, and in some cases. loss of autonomy. Most, if not all, SaaS products built from the ground up on open architecture are multi-tenant. Simply, you are sharing your solution with hundreds if not thousands of other companies within the same instance in that data center. They are logically separated and independent instances but all in one shared environment. It is within this type of deployment you can find cost savings for the customer and profit margin for the software company. This is where legacy software companies have struggled with porting their solutions to the cloud. In most cases the solutions aren’t architected to be cloud native so getting them into the cloud and multi-tenant is a large investment. Also, these solutions end up being hosted in data centers, which makes them challenging to manage, expensive and even requires development of wrappers or UI code to make them more browser compatible.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE BY MICHAEL CARUSO IN THE 2022 SUMMER EDITION OF GAMING & LEISURE MAGAZINE.