Business without borders drives global cloud adoption
- Summary:
- In a world of business without borders, there are several common use cases that increasingly drive adoption of enterprise-wide cloud applications
Let’s take a look at how cloud can help organizations tackle some of these business strategy challenges.
Acquisitions: Pressure for top-line revenue growth makes merger and acquisition (M&A) based strategies inevitable for many organizations. But a successful M&A growth strategy depends on the smooth integration of new organizations. Rather than trying to harmonize many different hardware platforms and data centers, it's much quicker to adopt cloud solutions to create common ground between organizations in a way that gives everyone the capabilities they need.
Divestitures: Spinoffs have the opposite problem of M&As. When the IT resources of the old parent organization are no longer available, the spinoff needs a quick way to replace those capabilities without adding cost or starting from scratch. In many cases, spinoffs happen so quickly, there's simply no time to figure out how to build a data center or implement new business systems. A cloud-based IT solution gives a newly divested company the support, speed, and intelligence to go on functioning efficiently—sometimes more efficiently than when it was part of the parent company.
Joint ventures and partnerships: Companies that establish strategic alliances or partnerships with companies in other industries often prefer to keep the joint operations distinct from other parts of the business. To maintain clear lines of authority and accountability, it's sometimes worthwhile to set up separate software systems just to handle the joint operations. That way, both companies can clearly see the value of the joint operation and nobody will feel like their contribution isn't suitably valued. It also helps clarify whether a joint operation is genuinely succeeding on its own merits, or if it's time to pull the plug. If the companies decide that it really is time to pull the plug, shutting down a cloud solution is just that simple: flip the switch and walk away. There's no need to figure out how to dispose of unneeded data center resources.
Business expansion into new geographies: Because of the high cost of shipping and the need to meet consumers' increasing demand for speed, many companies now build plants and distribution centers close to areas of maximum consumer demand. That means rolling out information systems rapidly and economically enough to bring new facilities online quickly. Cloud systems make it easy to deploy software and data wherever it’s needed—without having to maintain physical data centers in disparate locations. This minimizes both capital investments and risk. Plus, with robust cloud-based systems, companies can get support for multiple languages and currencies, making localization much easier to accomplish.
It’s about speed: Above all, cloud computing is about speed. In an economy where organizations have to be ready to change strategies and adopt new tactics faster than ever, cloud computing is the quickest, most economical way to make things happen in a hurry and truly achieve business without borders.
Infor CloudSuite gives companies the flexibility to offer that kind of rapid, comprehensive support for a lower cost and in a shorter time than they ever could before. It also reduces risk by lowering the fixed costs involved with building locations that might need to be moved again in response to new sources of customer demand or global expansion or contraction.
Read more about the flexible and proven solutions Infor CloudSuite offers for your industry.
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