My Final Blog for IS5800

Cloud computing...I thought I was done thinking about it, but now my favorite company has moved "to the cloud". I discovered this right after I read this article about how moving to the cloud might not save you as much as you thought it would (as I pointed out in my midterm!)http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/why-cloud-computing-may-cost-more-than-on-premise-systems/4459?tag=mantle_skin;content

CCE, or Coca-Cola Enterprises (my fave), has a workforce of over 72,000 employees worldwide. Apparently, they had difficulty getting everyone "on the same page", so they decided to move to the cloud. In a case like this, with such a large company spread out over the globe, moving to the cloud makes alot of sense. It presents a great advantage over the competitors by reducing the information latency that we talked about in class last week. According to a Microsoft Case Study presented on ZDNET,

"CCE now has a robust intranet portal to support worldwide collaboration and communication of corporate strategy. The intranet serves as a central location for things like CCE’s HR process improvement and self-service HR portal, and provides a communication platform for CCE’s desk-based workers. The CEO has launched active blogs where employees openly comment and interact with company leadership. CCE has also increased employee engagement and education around corporate responsibility and sustainability through the portal content. Within four weeks of enabling users to create SharePoint team sites, there were over 800 requests for sites focused on business priorities and customer-facing business teams."

Check out the entire article here:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000004569

How's that for streamlining things? I think this is a fabulous example of how the "cloud" can work for a company. I'm delighted to see such an example, it really clarified cloud computing for me. I still believe, however, that "IT Doesn't Matter", and like Carr, any company that does not have a global (or even national) presence like CCE should be very careful about jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. The article that I mentioned in the beginning brought out alot of the risks we talked about in class, mainly, upgrades, upgrades, upgrades are required for the cloud! The article also highlighted the fact that the market is changing due to cloud computing, and

"the lines between service providers and consumers are blurring, and this has implications for pure software vendorsIn many cases, vendors are assuming the role as service providers....cloud providers [and this means most vendors now], because they are in the business of providing a service, are starting to become much more transparent regarding the usage in order to help their customers make decisions and plan for the future.”

I'm still of the opinion, (and keep in mind, I'm a conservative accountant) that while cloud computing can benefit gigantic companies like CCE or McDonald's, it is NOT a good move for smaller companies!

thank you and have a nice evening...