We are living through the exciting times in information technology. A wave of information explosion and the corresponding need to process it efficiently and effectively is placing relentless demands on IT. To handle this wave, the concept of cloud comes. Cloud Computing is the main buzzword now days. Many big IT leaders such as Amazon (EC2), Google (Google Apps), Microsoft (Azure), Salesforce and many more have embraced the concept of delivering software over the Internet, as it can mean lower costs and less maintenance for those who use the applications. IBM announced its Blue Cloud initiative, offering a package of hardware and software to allow its customers to create their own internal clouds. The company had already partnered with Google to provide cloud solutions for six American universities and hopes to grow the program to allow more universities and corporate and government entities to join in. Many companies are offering hardware designed to operate on cloud networks, including Hewlett Packard, Dell and Clear Cube. And according to industry analysts, Cloud Computing is here to stay:
- By 2012, net new IT growth in spending will be $30.8 billion, 25% of which will be IT Cloud Services.
- Cloud services will be essential tools for addressing the biggest business demands of IT: speed, cost, scale, rich variety of solutions.
- Of the companies using cloud computing services to enable accessibility from anywhere; 83% are specifically using cloud computing services for software as a service.
Cloud is getting used in many of the areas where there is need to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Enterprise centric systems are one of the best example areas which are leveraging a cloud computing environment of shared infrastructure and platform for global collaboration, companies can take advantage of seamless end-to-end business processes, cross-community visibility, and lower costs to support these advanced capabilities to better meet their supply chain community’s ever more demanding business requirements.
A lot of effort and money has been expended especially into the traditional enterprise-centric systems and also most of the bandwidth of the IT staff is consumed by the run-and-maintain aspects. Another drawback of the traditional SCM systems is the wastage of lot of resources and money spent by companies for whole year, making sure their servers can handle peak loads during the holiday season. So what happens after the holidays have passed and the server loads slow down? Most companies will still be running and maintaining all this equipment until next Holiday season. It’s not uncommon for most companies to be running their servers at just 20% capacity most of the year and while there is a lot of capital and resources being used, they are providing no economic or environmental benefit at all. To avoid the wastage of 80% of servers computation power most of the year, cloud computing can be utilized to form the SCM cloud that will deliver the supply chain solutions as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). SaaS in an on-demand paradigm of IT solutions delivery that allows for trial before usage, pay for what you use, and rapid value with minimal IT hassles.
Amitive is the first Supply Chain Management software solution to fully embrace and leverage cloud computing. Amitive enables a community of business partners to work together seamlessly on a real time, common platform and make smarter decisions faster with clear lines of cross-community visibility. Business intelligence developer PivotLink and visual order management provider OrderMotion also announced a new SaaS solution designed to provide retailers with on-demand sales and order management analysis. Its objective is to let businesses monitor and manage marketing, merchandising and operations by providing secure, collaborative real-time reports on each stage of the order life cycle.
Let’s discuss in somewhat more detail that how the SCM services are provided through Cloud infrastructure. The figure shows the basic SCM Cloud Architecture [Source: SupplyChainBrain]. Through this architecture, all the complexities of getting the SCM services are hidden to normal user. Let’s take an example, earlier retailers have to go through a laborious and time-consuming way of finding a suitable application that can place, manage and fulfil orders. They need to choose a product after evaluating many of the available solutions and accommodate technology constraints that come with it. Then the complete go live process involving setup, configure, deploy, and testing is done. Only the retailers who have the scope of huge investments can only afford such process. But using the SCM cloud, all this process is hidden from the retailers using abstraction layer. They are provided with the services that they want without taking into consideration the lengthy process to Go-Live. Another benefit of SCM cloud will be that now the small enterprises can also afford these costly processes at economical price. An SCM cloud enables small businesses to have a dedicated Sterling 8.0 instance for order management even when they neither have an IT department nor can lease a space in a data center.
Thus Cloud Computing solves a huge problem in capital inefficiency and helps companies save energy and the environment, by allowing companies to easily scale up IT resources when demand is high and scale down when activity slows. SCM cloud also helps in supporting the green initiative of saving the environment.
No comments:
Post a Comment