The future is in services

Last week, I attended GigaOm’s Structure ’09 Conference: Put Cloud Computing to Work. It was worthwhile to attend and I intend to return next year. It was exciting to see how the services business model is being rapidly adopted by the technology-delivery value-chain.

In a talk titled The Cloud in Context, Russ Daniels, VP and CTO of Cloud Services Strategy at HP put it most succinctly, describing HP’s vision as:
“Everything is a Service”.
Full video of Daniels’ talk here. While the “everything is a service” mantra is almost certainly overreaching, it drives home an undeniable point; the action is in services. To make it fully, I think you have to start with the view from the customer’s perspective.

The future is in services

The economics of on-demand services

A post by Ben Kepes over at CloudAve got me thinking about the economics of on-demand services, so I thought I’d do a quick blog. On-demand services businesses come in all shapes and sizes. This is particularly true today with the emergence of SaaS, where the vendor diversity is staggering. Despite the diversity of services – ranging from traditional communications services (think voice, video and data) to highly verticalized SaaS applications (think point of sale applications for yoga studios) – the fundamental economic building blocks of these businesses are, for the most part, the same.

The economics of on-demand services