Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Summary

In many markets, time is a critical competitive advantage. Generally, you get what you pay for, but in the world of the cloud and its pay-per-use resources, acceleration can be free.

For companies trying to accelerate time to value—that is, “competing in time”—the cloud can be a cost-effective weapon of choice. This fact has two implications.

1. Companies should leverage parallelism where possible to accelerate relevant business processes, reduce cycle times, and enhance customer responsiveness.

2. They can accomplish this for free using the cloud.

As more companies accelerate their processing, computing workloads placed on cloud providers will mutate from longer tasks on fewer processors to shorter, spikier tasks requiring more processors. Some service providers may see a shift in individual and aggregate demand characteristics.

Moving to shorter times will create opportunities for some service providers to offer shorter billing increments, just as some telcos bill by six-second increments and some hotels bill by the hour.