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15 June 2015

We are starting to call it an industry cloud but the original term was ‘community cloud’ and in many ways that is still a better description. When talking about cloud, ‘the cloud’ or clouds, ‘term’ suggests an undeserved precision. Essentially, whatever the architecture, the concept is of a cloud platform shared by those who have a community of interests — even though they may be competitors in business. One of the best known and a great exemplar is the New York Stock Exchange Capital Markets Community Platform. This was a ground-breaking financial services cloud that has driven innovation in trading applications, disaster- recovery strategies and related solutions. It is a highly industry-specific Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) based solution that offers a secure, robust and cost-effective environment for hosting common applications and services.

The potential is clear for other business sectors, government, healthcare and multiple other areas of activity with a commonality of interests and shared conventions or protocols, not to mention communications and application types. Some will have security demands that are not only high but particular to the sector, such as financial services or healthcare. Others might be largely informational, like charities and voluntary bodies or cooperatives. The NYSE example is a good one also in that it suggests that a community or industry cloud should be governed and possibly run by a body that is trusted by all participants. That might be an established industry body, a government authority (HSE, Charities Commission) or an elected council. If the concept gains traction, practical models will evolve.

Carl_Dempsey_Salesforce

We see an ecosystem and related expertise building in sectors like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and others. At the same time when we talked to a large group of CIOs in the UK recently they were not particularly enthusiastic about industry-specific councils, an idea we put forward, but were very keen on cross-industry communications, Carl Dempsey, Salesforce.com

Growing maturity
The concept of industry clouds speaks to the growing maturity of cloud, according to Carl Dempsey, the Salesforce.com VP who leads its solution engineering team in EMEA. “By 2017 cloud will be a nearly $30 billion (€27.5 billion) a year industry, IDC estimates, and it is growing three times faster than any other ICT sector. So there will clearly be variants in the services and market offerings and plenty of room for competition. In the early days, cloud was seen as a point solution in many ways. Today, global enterprises are using it to run large chunks of their business. Equally significant is that the level of trust has risen along with the maturity of the technology.”

For Salesforce.com the community cloud per se has not yet emerged, but on the other hand its strategy is looking towards industry specific solutions built out from its public cloud. “We see an ecosystem and related expertise building around that in sectors like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and others. At the same time when we talked to a large group of CIOs in the UK recently they were not particularly enthusiastic about industry-specific councils, an idea we put forward, but were very keen on cross-industry communications. They wanted to gain inspiration and ideas from what other organisations and industries were doing.”

Dempsey reckons the value of industry clouds would be in what he calls the back office and systems of record that have to be there and compliant. “If you are in financial services or healthcare you can’t not be PCI or HIPAA compliant, for instance. What we are seeing — and it may have a bearing on how industry or community clouds develop — is minimal interest in business as usual solutions, even when they are an improvement on the existing. Business leaders are focussed on transforming, engaging with customers in new ways and using new technologies.”

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