Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Driving New Business Opportunities by Surdak Christopher

Author:Surdak, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Management Association, AMACOM Division
Published: 2014-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Source: Salesforce.com Annual Financial Reports3

FIGURE 11.2. Revenue Growth for Salesforce.com, 2005 to 2012

Companies like Vistaprint will close this gap very quickly, as such integration makes sense for all parties involved. Salesforce benefits by advancing its capabilities from Level 2 to Level 3 cloudification, their customers benefit by having more options for having business outcomes delivered by competitive third parties, and those third parties benefit by opening up their services to a marketplace that drives business to them. The value proposition is so sufficiently high that I would not be surprised if these sorts of services were established by Salesforce and other PaaS providers by the end of 2013. Hence, a key growth strategy for these PaaS providers is to create and support these outcome marketplaces themselves before their customers do it for them.

Outcome marketplaces then become a key differentiator between Level 3 and Level 4 cloudification. Following the previous example, Salesforce.com might create a marketplace for mailing list outsourcing where there are dozens of companies competing to deliver that outcome rather than just one. As Level 4 cloudification develops further, every business outcome that might come from the PaaS provider’s platform may be supported by an independent marketplace, each populated by other companies competing for the end customers’ business. At this stage, one of the primary value propositions of the platform owner is assisting customers in optimizing their business outcomes across these marketplaces. Indeed, orchestration of business outcomes across the platform’s supported processes will be the true differentiator of the platform. Because of quantafication, outcome marketplaces will develop whether the PaaS providers support them or not. As such, it will be in the platform providers’ best interest to foster the growth of these markets themselves, so that they can continue to control part of the process value chain.

Finally, PaaS providers will further advance their platforms to Level 5 cloudification, where the management of business outcomes across multiple outcome marketplaces will be optimized to the specific needs of each customer. At this point, PaaS providers will support fully customizeable, market-leveraged business processes that maximize the value delivered to end customers. As with quantafication Level 4, a Level 5 cloudified provider will also support competitive marketplaces for managing process and outcome exceptions. For example, if a company wanted to shop out the creation of a mass mailing and was concerned about the potential privacy concerns that might vary from state to state, it could find and engage an information privacy lawyer in a competitive marketplace for that exception.

The evolution of cloudification from Level 1 to Level 5 will take less than five years; such is the pace of business change in this day and age. This migration will occur both because of demand-side pressures from outsourcees, who are looking to improve their financial performance, and from supply-side pressures, as more and more middle-class workers are cut loose from their employers and begin looking elsewhere for gainful employment. Most of these people are likely to become freelance workers inside outcome marketplaces, performing their value-added work in small increments to whomever is the highest bidder on a given day.

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