7/11/2012
Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketing led a compelling session on the Cloud and Azure, in which he led with this thought provoking statement:
“Professor Richard Foster of Yale University estimates that by 2020 more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet.”
That’s right—three-quarters of the S&P 500! This is all about the power of the Cloud to democratize the competitive landscape. Bob went on to emphasize that the cloud is all about disruption. Think about it: who would have guessed ten years ago that Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the Cloud would be a book seller and a search engine?
With the Cloud's democratization of scale and reach, enterprise-class applications with unlimited scalability are now available not only to the Fortune 500 companies but also to mid-size companies and even start-ups. The cloud vastly lowers the barrier to entry for competitors: two guys in a garage can now have the same IT infrastructure as a global corporation, without the upfront investment. Bob challenged the entire audience to think about their business and the potential impact of the cloud on their competition because even if you are a big dog, “the Chihuahuas will be nipping at your heels.”
Organizations who may not take the threat of a lap dog start-up seriously would do well to heed the words of Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, "Even the tiniest Poodle or Chihuahua is still a wolf at heart" (Dogs: The Wolf Within). For SaaS providers and other organizations seeking to harness the power and flexibility of the cloud, InRule Technology offers InRule for Azure: the power of InRule, deployed in Azure. Read more about InRule for Azure